• Rating:
Thundercat is one of those much better than us at playing the bass. You can tell because he uses a lot of semitones, like be bop, and when someone uses all those semitones in tight spaces, then he's a phenomenon, there's no doubt, it's the First Commandment of the Bass. The Commandments of the Bass reveal themselves to you if you burn many bushes, that one time when you're lucky and you make one burn slowly. You hear the voice of Charles Mingus telling you brother, one: add semitones; two: learn to slap and then never slap again; three: on the fifth string you hang your underwear, with the sixth you get the salad out of your teeth, if you have more than six, you're Chinese; four: pick only if poor you are white; five: if poor you are white, consider the piano; six: you can tell the girls you play bass, but never actually play it in front of them; seven: you can start doing solos only after your son's graduation; eight: everything you need is in the first seven frets, the rest of the neck is just to make them sound low; nine: stay away from effects because it's already hard to play; ten: pickups all always full volume, equalization from the amp, the nuances come from your touch; eleven: steal, get high, do what you gotta do, but never listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Thundercat is a bit heretical because he plays six strings, the instrument of the evil one, and uses auto wah, which sooner or later should be demonized like Rockit and Adinolfi. And he does arpeggios. And then he makes tracks with two basses, annoying.
But we forgive him, because with all the showy embellishments and flashy style, he manages the miracle of playing on track and with exquisite taste. Put on Them Changes at the party and you see everyone swaying, everyone, tried it yesterday: even someone with a butt like Renato Pozzetto reading an article by Gustavo Zagrebelsky, Lake Como on a March afternoon, Ryan Gosling in Drive.
Thundercat is versatile, black as pitch, wherever you place him he fits perfectly. He's done amazing things - listen to MmmHmm please, "paste" doesn't work for the link and I don't know why - with Flying Lotus, who now produces and endorses him; he had the Suicidal Tendencies phase, had a hand in To Pimp A Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar, which is one of the most important albums in the life of anyone who has heard it.
Drunk talks about boozing and yet I let my uncle listen to it, who drives a 2002 Focus station wagon with the stock Herbie Hancock CD, and has a ten-thousand-euro bass setup. And my uncle digs it, because there's Uh Uh that has the vibes of a cop movie and of Weather Report and oozes semitones.
Drunk has all the hallmarks of an audiophile lawyer's album, but you let the last street kid hear it and they dig it because Thundercat has a falsetto straight to radio, harmonized always, born of the stars, oh he sounds like Pharrell, then at some point there's Pharrell himself, who says something like «they make us think it's a race war, when it's a class struggle». Pharrell. And at some point there's Kendrick, whom I expected even on the new Baustelle, but it's always a pleasure, and by the way here he has a different bass below him. Listen to how the bass sounds: woody, midrange but without disturbance; really played, with all the feel at your disposal.
The bpm fine-tuned to just right by the precise calculation of the black groove instinct. Don't shift a beat even by a fraction of a second. The nocturnal tones if you listen at night, but then the morning after it feels like the most beautiful wake-up album with the sun you've had. Just perfect.
Loading comments slowly
