Boston area funk mob Bad Rabbits seemed to arrive with their 2009 EP Stick Up Kids, a pop smart bomb that rearranged the big beat heft of new jack swing and Morris Day style funk into plush, full-band R&B. That record rocketed the band into a series of unlikely tours with everyone from rap legend Slick Rick-- who once enlisted them as his backing band-- to the punk and metal upstarts on the Vans Warped Tour. Bad Rabbits’ audience steadily grew, but their repertoire of songs remained puzzlingly static. In 2011, with no new release in sight, they launched a quick stopgap cover series: a lumbering, crunchy rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature”, a taut, synth-heavy trek through Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” and straight reads of songs by The-Dream and Deftones. The cover series might’ve aimed for homage, but it also revealed a startling versatility. Bad Rabbits were bigger than the freewheeling funk revivalism of Stick Up Kids let on.
Bad Rabbits have finally released a full length in American Love, which was produced by Bay area instrumental hip-hop whiz B. Lewis. (They’re also said to be putting the finishing touches on another project with the help of new jack swing forbear Teddy Riley and Deftones leader Chino Moreno.) American Love finds the band eager to show off the moves they’ve learned since Stick Up Kids. Singer Dua Boakye twists limber vocal melodies into meaty harmonies throughout, especially on “Dirty”, where a chorus of backing vocals flank his pleading lead with flatly sung scales approximating Gregorian chant. “Doin’ It” and “Dance Moves” find the rest of the band dallying with Latin music behind him, the former pitting samba rhythms against funk ones and the latter pairing a freestyle-informed bass riff with salsa horns that comes off like a modern day Miami Sound Machine. “We Can Roll” and “Sayonara” both skate in on crunchy, psychedelic breakdowns, a musculature of rhythm that might be attributable to drummer Sheel Davé, who also plays in the Massachusetts math metal band Irepress. It’s a power that makes methodical rock numbers like “Fall in Love” oddly heavy one minute and gives “Sayonara” a buoyant swing the next.
The band’s newfound musical breadth meets a perfect shaman in B. Lewis, whose own cosmic boom bap favors a dense maximalism not unlike Flying Lotus at full tilt. Lewis’ ace sonic architecture leaves American Love brimming with interlocking instrumental tracks and vocal melodies neatly stacked in unexpected corners. Every guitar lick and squiggly synth figure is given fair breathing room, and underheard hooks and submerged melodies constantly reveal themselves on repeat listens. It makes the band’s earlier work seem lean and maybe even claustrophobic by comparison. There’s also the sense that some of the album’s hazier passages, like the intro of opener “We Can Roll”, which teases a spartan rock workout out of a spectral, ambient mist, and the burbling synth underpinning of “Get Up and Go”, might be the result of Lewis’ influence. While American Love finds both band and producer working with an expanded sonic palette, the fundamental mechanics of Bad Rabbits’ songwriting still remain relatively unchanged.
Bad Rabbits still espouse a sex-positive randiness that puts them in the direct lineage of lustful R&B maestros like Bobby Brown, and Dua’s lyrics explore the same axis between new love and unfettered lust. Bad Rabbits’ greatest trick is still the way the music genuflects to bygone forms of R&B music without getting too mired in period-specific production quirks and hero worship that might date the music. The growth spurt between Stick Up Kids and American Love resembles the moment in the mid-90s where another soul band, Raphael Saadiq’s Tony! Toni! Toné!, cashed out on their new jack swing contemporaries and set a course for the music of their parents, a direction that ended up inadvertently kicking off the neo-soul movement. Bad Rabbits have a few kinks to work out still, but with a crack band, a nimble vocalist, and the tutelage of Teddy Riley, they’re certainly headed in the right direction.
