The rap collective Odd Future has always had far-ranging taste-- early generalizations about their shock-tactic lyrics tended to ignore just how broad their range of influence spanned. When Tyler, the Creator was just getting into the process of recording his third album Wolf, he confided in an interview with Spin that he was ready to make those outré influences more explicit. “I don't know how, but I'm gonna try shit like this out,” he said, in reference to the funk-soul revivalists the Stepkids, who he had playing on his laptop during the interview.
As that connection indicates, the Stepkids are best seen, not as some kind of novelty throwback act, but as one of several projects emerging in a burgeoning West Coast scene, including the Odd Future associated acts the Internet and the Jet Age of Tomorrow, as well as older luminaries like Dâm-Funk. The Connecticut trio can sound as if they’re splitting the difference between their Stones Throw brethren James Pants and Mayer Hawthorne, making vintage-sounding soul that occasionally slides over into full-on funk. Their new album, Troubadour, is a loose concept album about an “insecure” singer character for whom “night is his day, work is his play,” and “words are his pay.”
The concept is a bit of a macguffin though. Vocalist/drummer Tim Walsh confessed to The Guardian that the songs on Troubadour are “pretty autobiographical.” And indeed, a dearth of imagination in the songwriting on the album pinpoints the lyrics as the last remaining weakness of the Stepkids experience. The songs can be difficult to set apart from your everyday pop boilerplate: On “Bitter Bug,” the worst offender, the listener is subjected to ideas like “life on the road is crazy,” and “it takes a lot of patience, to deal with these situations.”
But “Bitter Bug,” for all of its grating lines, is one of several bona fide pop songs on Troubadour that take the record beyond its self-titled predecessor and make it, in many places, a dynamite listen. The song structures here are fantastic. “Bitter Bug" enters with so much fanfare-- resounding bass, ecstatic vocal backdrops-- that only the most Grinch-like of listeners is likely to hold the lyrics against it. “Desert in the Dark,” (a remix of which showed up on the Jet Age’s recent album) and “Moving Pictures” are both crowd-movers, which manage to retain the experimental edge that defines the Stepkids’ music, packed into potent pop.
The music here is as effervescent as ever, as befits a trio made up of former session musicians. “The Lottery” provides a good example of how multi-faceted songs never become overstuffed-- it’s got everything from shimmering keyboards to a horn section on the chorus to a scratched-up vocal sample, but as each element is slotted into it’s own specific place in the song, the sound remains blissfully uncluttered.
The Stepkids’ white-boy soul could be seen as fitting well into a spate of recent pop albums that make use of an understated smoothness, but the bombast of the best songs on Troubadour excites in a way that the too-cool stylings of The 20/20 Experience and Blurred Lines often fail to do*.* Like their soul-funk contemporaries, the Stepkids mine a polymathic knowledge of music, distill it into a variety of seemingly incompatible sounds and then filter those through a funkified, purple lens. It’s an adventurous, impressive display of instrumental can-do, a music nerd’s romp through high-fidelity magic that’s only occasionally hampered by insipid writing.
