A little more than a decade after Deadringer came out, there's enough music—and enough attempts at reconfiguring his style—to help you construct a picture of how all over the map RJD2's career has been. Whether it's a clear picture is another thing entirely; his shift from underground rap production next big thing to muddled indie-pop singer-songwriter to studio-bound funkateer has done a lot to confuse any set-in-stone ideas of what the RJD2 sound was or is supposed to be. His partnership with Aaron Livingston as Icebird seemed like a good first step towards a reconciliation of everything RJ had built up in his portfolio over the previous ten years or so. But it also opened the door for a big “now what?" and the hesitant anticipation of future work that could build on the idea of an all-encompassing, canonical RJD2 musical identity.
And now, for what feels like the first time in his career, RJ has released an album that comes across as a successful culmination of all his previous ideas and experiments rather than simply a new shift in style.. The title of More Is Than Isn't says as much; these are established trademarks and tics—bombastic drum breaks, sunshine-gleam brass, an armada of mothership synthesizers—that definitely sound like they came from the same hands that Deadringer, Since We Last Spoke and The Colossus did. But it's that first album's boom-bap crate-digging, its follow-up's prog-funk ambition, and his most recent album's cartoon neo-soul all streamlined into an overarching sound, with all the Pavlov triggers and odd quirks and over-the-top crests that combination implies.
With this album uniting everything that made RJ RJ over the years, it establishes a definitive place for him after all this time: that of the hip-hop-inflected neo-soul fusionist producer who is just as comfortable working in moods as genres. With his instrumentals, it's as though he's working more in potential-soundtrack mode than anything; it's easier to describe his beats nowadays for what montages or scenes they could evoke rather than where their component parts could place them demographically. You can definitely dance to a lot of it: the Isley-flecked groove of “Behold, Numbers!” extends this summer's disco-funk revivalism into early fall, “Winter Isn't Coming” goes all neon-space-pyramid with high-BPM footwork-jostling bongo breaks, and the Rick Rubin-oid, Mellotron/piano/space-laser breakdown showcase “Her Majesty's Socialist Request” has already proven through its video to be a killer b-boy/b-girl anthem.
The vocal cuts are both a bit less frequent and a fair amount stronger than in his last couple records. There are a couple strong rap tracks, with emerging Columbus art-rapper P. Blackk rolling out fluid doubletime boasts over the Southern bounce-style “Bathwater” and old Soul Position partner Blueprint harnessing some of that vintage “Final Frontier” smoothness into nimble heist-metaphor storytelling for the Meters-go-caper-flick soul twang of “It All Came to Me in a Dream”. And while RJ does lend that hesitant falsetto of his to one of the tracks—the twee, contemplative “Dirty Hands,” where he actually fits well amongst the beatless chimes and strings—he largely leaves the vocals to R&B singers who can do his heavy-breaks production justice, like Icebird collaborator Aaron Livingston (“Love and Go”) or Little Brother's Phonte Coleman (doing a more straightfaced—and affecting—version of his Percy Miracles loverman schtick on “Temperamental”). It peaks on “See You Leave,” a cut featuring Roots-affiliated rapper STS and singer/writer Khari Mateen, that's as buttery as it gets; on an album that fits right in with R&B and hip-hop's free-for-all cross-genre fusion it's good to hear that RJ can build trad-soul beats with the best of them.
Still, as easy as it is to click with these songs as dance tracks or muso-appreciation fodder (RJ can still program and orchestrate a breakdown like nobody's business), it's better still to zone out and catch their sense of mood. While the vocal tracks are well-realized, this is the first album RJ's made in a long time that actually feels like it's satisfied to say most of what it has to say in instrumental form. His style-weaving, retro-contemporary instrumentation dislodges sounds from their own times and finds new modes for them. So when he rolls out burbling synthesizers that recall the early '90s heyday of ambient techno and 70s prog and glazes them over a class-of-'88 no-bullshit boom-bap break (“A Lot of Night Ahead of You”), or constructs a noir-jazz ballad that snaps from early Tom Waits tipsiness to uptempo Mayfield-style funk (“Got There, Sugar?”), all the parts fit together to turn a pastiche into something a bit less beholden to the sum of its parts. It's less about where the pieces come from than what they're evoking. And even if it's made clear by the conceptual thread that ties the album together—a three-part suite that leads off the album, appears at the halfway mark, and concludes it with three emotively varying takes on the same melodic theme—the fact that the whole of More Is Than Isn't evokes so many different well-built moods is testament to how much he's been able to elaborate on what he's capable of.
