As a relatively sedate instrumental album with plodding drums and dark atmospherics, Blockhead's second solo album, Downtown Science, isn't much different from his first. While it's status quo for Blockhead, the most lasting details on the album might be the most incidental ones. Over the heavy boom-bap and reverberating bass of the DJ Shadow-lite opener "Expiration Date", there's a sample of a male vocal who laments how commonplace heartbreak is, singing "probably hundreds of wonderful love affairs go bad in this town every week," and then, almost inaudibly, "...it's a big town."
"Expiration Date" is something of a false start, and the record finds its feet on "Roll out the Red Carpet". Blockhead is less a hot beat factory than a subtle idea man, and the track is crammed with them: tweaked female choruses and sweeping strings cribbed from Daedelus's playbook bump against tribunal-worthy horns and fluid, shifting drums; the all-too-brief "Serenade" marries harp flourishes with dirty electric piano and a swaying, handclap-driven beat.
From there, it's a long, moody plain until the stop-start drums of "Stop Motion Traffic", the filthy funk of "The Art of Walking" anchored by an excellent bass line, and the crashing hyper-compressed guitar chords of the dynamic "Good Block Bad Block". The pacing is an improvement from his debut, but it's rare that Blockhead pulls the trigger and builds a really quirky or unique soundscape that he's capable of, just scraping the surface on the aforementioned tracks or the junkyard jazz of "Dough Nation".
"Roll Out the Red Carpet" opens with a courting couple from an antiquated musical, planning to meet in Washington Square, and the manic comedian sampled in "Good Block Bad Block" could just as likely be describing hometown geography ("good block, bad block/gun block, crack block") instead of a nod to his DJ handle, and amidst the final stunner "Long Walk Home", a man sings out "I've been terribly alone/ And forgotten old Manhattan." A unifying theme could have elevated this album above other instrumental hip-hop-- and above Blockhead's own solo work-- but he's content to use the snippets as segues, which is a shame. Downtown Science could have been a sleek limousine ride through Blockhead's version of New York, but we'll have to settle for an appropriately funky cab ride.
