Jamie Lidell
Multiply

In recent months, I've often read about Jamie Lidell. I searched in vain for his debut album. A stroke of luck in Amsterdam allowed me to buy "Multiply," his second and latest effort.
A glam and shimmering psychedelic cover with Jamie's face as an over-the-top supersexsymbol, blending with the colors, encases a CD of extraordinary technological funky-soul. Stop.

This album is released by Warp (among many, Aphex Twin and Antipop Consortium) and is perhaps the most accessible thing in the entire catalog.
Jamie Lidell is completely out there; before recording this album, he used to perform concerts all by himself: he’d record himself as a human beatbox, loop it, and then sing over it. And he has an incredible voice, truly too black!
"Multiply" is the soul, the funk, the blues of 2000 reborn from the ashes of everything that came before. Razhel, Sly Stone, Prince, Marvin Gaye, Jamiroquai, Reverend Brown, and even the Red Hot Chili Peppers all blended together with a good dose of electronic sauce. But it's either the voice or how it's all dressed, that this album opens fascinating doors, makes you shake your ass, entertains an attentive mind, and opens new gates for the future of black far from the mainstream nu-soul.

"You Got Me Up" starts as sexy and loose-limbed as Sly. "Multiply," beneath its vintage suit, has a beautiful text of lysergic modernity ("I’m so tired of repeating myself beating myself up wanna take the trip and multiply"). "When I Come Back Around" is a glitch-salsa collaboration between Prince and the Godfather Of Noyze. In "A Little Bit More," a vocal loop as dark as the last Mos Def provides the base for a sprightly interpretation worthy of an effeminate James Brown. The contagious "What’s The Use" is jazzed-up while "Newme" is a super funky jam session between the late '80s Red Hot Chili Peppers and a producer out of his mind on amphetamines.
"The City" is the smartest single in recent years: a blues soul with a paranoid percussionist and vocal disturbances that seem to come from all directions.
Heresy, but it seems like a Tom Waits aural artist from the future.

This album is extraordinary, period. It may not have the commercial space it deserves but has the potential to become a beacon for the black music to come.