The idea of the instrumental virtuoso has fallen out of favor in some underground music circles. This prejudice is usually based around the idea that anyone who has that much invested in the technical aspects of their preferred instrument has gotten so far up their super-muso ass that there's no emotional engagement in the music itself. Bass maestro Stephen Bruner's found a few ways to avoid that fate: cultivating a sessionman's versatility equally suited to gigs with both Erykah Badu and Suicidal Tendencies, aligning himself with the artsy but down-to-earth Brainfeeder community, and, as Thundercat, putting out solo work that, from the outset of 2011's The Golden Age of Apocalypse, used his chops almost exclusively for a feeling of fidgety joy.
But what's really made Thundercat interesting over the last few years, and what gives his new Flying Lotus-co-produced album Apocalypse such a kick, is the sense that he's completely divorced his music from any sort of pretense. He doesn't put up some kind of esoteric barrier between the vision of a serious artiste and an unwitting audience that supposedly needs to be schooled on what true musicianship is. He's more dealing with a simple set of ideas, emotions, sentiments, and experiences, elaborated upon in a surprising way. At his best, Thundercat has reversed the evolutionary process where technology, experimentation, and crossover made music more complicated-- instead taking prog and fusion as a starting point to be whittled down, rather than a destination to be built up to.
Apocalypse gets immediate real quick. Opener “Tenfold” takes off with the sort of astral-jazz keyboards you might hear on a Lonnie Liston Smith interlude filtered through the TONTO synthesizer. But the real pulse is an insistent pounding, chord-blurring 1-2-3-4 hardcore rumble that offsets Bruner's see-saw falsetto, tersely belting out sonic prayers two or three words at a time. It sets the precedent for an album that brings its catchiest tendencies to the forefront and lets the virtuosic stuff in through side channels. What comes up as a whole is this odd but endearing blend of plainspoken nonchalance and almost limitless musical eccentricity.
If that means Thundercat's music feels a little more traditionally song-oriented than before, he's found a way to keep that unpredictable energy of his intact, filtering it through familiar forms of indie R&B (the Mono/Poly coproduced “Heartbreaks + Setbacks”), electronified soul-folk (“Tron Song”, which feels like Terry Callier gone glitch), and bristling, burbling old-school boogie funk (the straightforwardly danceable “Oh Sheit it's X”). The moments of ramped-up rhythmic hustle remain a prominent feature; the shivery rollercoaster arpeggios and hand-cranked forward motion of “The Life Aquatic” and “Seven” have the feel of some enterprising knob-tweaker attempting to electronically retrofit the Minutemen's anxious energy for a Detroit dancefloor. But everything falls together in a way that settles into a steady groove that stays easy to follow and sink into.
The catalyst for this is that Thundercat's voice is more prominent and freewheeling now, as much of a driving factor in every song it appears in as the music backing him up. Where he falls short (but not very) in melodic range, he makes up for in stylistic variance: he's longing and frustrated in “Heartbreaks + Setbacks”, velvety and dance-drunk on “Oh Sheit it's X”, sky-gazingly ruminative on “Lotus and the Jondy”, warmly intense and motivational on “Special Stage”. More than ever, it feels like he's writing the instrumentation to fit his voice rather than substitute for or distract from it. And for a series of songs split with a dichotomy of channelling rich, often complex music through an engagingly human voice, the messages are unmistakeable.
The OutRun arcade sunniness of “Special Stage” is a key example: the song's message couldn't be more straightforward but the juxtaposition of simple lyrics and complicated music is the whole point. While there's little that seems quotable on paper, little touches of goofiness and first-thing-that-comes-to-mind spontaneity-- the delivery of his “Your purse is nice, baby, is it leather/ Or could it be suede” pickup line on “Oh Sheit it's X”, or the trip-out “straight up seein' goblins” borderline non-sequitir on “Lotus and the Jondy”-- make him the relatable gravitational center in the midst of a busy intersection of sound.
While much of its musical direction is based on Thundercat's collaborative brainstorming with Flying Lotus, the emotional core of Apocalypse rests either explicitly or implicitly under the shadow of the late Austin Peralta, the Brainfeeder musician and keyboardist/pianist on many of the songs on Golden Age of the Apocalypse. While there are specifically direct nods to his untimely passing-- most prominently on the elegaic closing suite “A Message for Austin/Praise the Lord/Enter the Void”-- the idea that Peralta's influence and memory runs through the entirety of this album's lifeblood makes a lot of sense. In some way or another, everything on Apocalypse is about taking stock, figuring yourself out, and making sure that the people that mean something to you know that they do. That it arrives through the conduit of somebody who has an elaborate means to express this, but knows when and how to keep things simple? That's how you translate virtuosity into something that hits you right in the heart.
