Steve Arrington is one of the great underheralded figures in funk, a drummer/vocalist who transitioned from lounge acts to gigs with the Escovedos before joining the Dayton funk band Slave for a five-year stretch of hitmaking. After a successful solo career stretching through most of the 80s, he left the business at the turn of the 90s for the ministry, about the same time as g-funk was starting to mine his catalog for inspiration and a kid from Pasadena named Damon Riddick was traversing over that same turf for his own early demos. The lineage is so clear and traceable that pairing up Dâm-Funk with the recently unretired Arrington seems like an intersection of a no-brainer homage and a dream come true. Anyone who's heard classics like “Just a Touch of Love,” “Weak at the Knees”, or “Dancin' in the Key of Life” can probably picture how natural and comfortable it'd sound for Arrington to jam over the spaced-out, smooth-gliding bounce of the style that made Toeachizown so immersive. Played straight and aiming right for the retro-funk bullseye would probably result in one of the most effortlessly crowdpleasing throwback records of the year.
That's not quite what they did. Higher is messier than that, and weirder, and ultimately more ambitious. Instead of a straightforward selection of boogie jams that effortlessly recall 1982 and leave it at that, Arrington and Riddick put together something spontaneous, potentially polarizing, and joyously strange. Arrington's lost none of his range or power over the years, and he sounds instantly recognizable as the same man who laid a rubbery, often unearthly voice over tracks three decades ago. But he willfully goes off on odd tangents and improvised-sounding flights, spends a bit of time dodging a traditional on-the-one delivery for a more off-beat performance, and overall treats Dâm-Funk's backing track more like a suggestion to be elaborated on than an authoritative, meter-driving pulse. This is that rare record where the singer beats all the critics in the race to call a sound “angular”-- “that angular approach that's so funky and new,” to be specific, as he points out on “Tap That.” It's a phrase that touches on all the quirks and brow-furrowing curveballs that come with that territory.
Granted, it's not that out of character for Dâm-Funk, though it does seem less experimental than he's been of late. Keeping in mind some of his more daring post-Toeachizown work, from his amped-up yet faithful cover of Human League's “Things That Dreams Are Made Of” to last year's New Wave-via-Minneapolis jam “I Don't Wanna Be a Star,” this feels a bit more like a reversion to still-funky, but less eclectic, turf. That means a lot of similar tempos, boom-clap drum machine patterns, and flowing chords-- sounds that barely stray from the Toeachizown palette-- and the musical simplicity threatens to fall into a droning sort of repetition, albeit a pleasant one. On the bright side, it never actually drags, and the production's still a good complement: it feels like Dâm-Funk decided to cede the spotlight to Arrington, leaving his work to buoy Arrington's voice, give him a springboard to riff off, and leaving the more eccentric touches to the singer himself.
And this is where Higher really shines: this is a genuinely sincere, silly, joyous record that seems difficult to actually look down at. What it sometimes lacks in heavy groove and get-down raunch it makes up for in sheer enthusiasm and unpredictability; “the beats tend to sound the same” is less of a concern when they're all glimmering and elated to such effective ends. This album has been in the works for something like three years, but it sounds like it was thrown together off-the-cuff over a weekend by two musicians with a lot of good, pent-up ideas. That's to its benefit, and it makes the giddiness feel extra-human. Arrington has a short monologue in the middle of “I Love This Music” where he mentions how how people tell him how his style keeps changing after all this time. “Yeah,” he explains, “I think like a jazz musician.” Then he lets out this non-verbal string of rapidfire rhythmic scatting that sounds too internalized to be just a mess-around joke, even if he caps it off with a rimshot.
There's a real spiritual vibe that Arrington brings to the table, too, albeit laid out in secular terms, and he seems more like he's ruminating or meditating than singing sometimes. The ceaseless positivity of the lucid memory-banking “Good Feeling” (“I remember Little League baseball, yo/ How the bases were pure white, and the grass was electric green”), the brightly refracting refrains of love-song “Magnificent", “I Be Goin' Hard' and its “stuck on stooo-pid” defiance filtered through deliberately cartoonish runs that toy with his virtuoso range-- it's somewhere between being church and being #based.
