An extremely experimental jazz and hip hop adventure.
“Stil Ain’t Find Me”, a short but pivotal track on ANIMALS, runs a mere 1:47 minutes, but what happens in that short time! Kassa Overall – drummer, producer, rapper – lets his jazz band play to the digital noise, the piece pauses again and again, as if it needs to catch its breath in this chase. “Still ain’t finding me,” he whispers again and again, setting the pace on his drums.
The guy from Seattle isn’t the only one who combines jazz and hip-hop. But as adventurous as Kassa Overall is, very few do it. The question of whether ANIMALS is a hip hop record with jazz influences or vice versa can hardly be answered. Kassa Overall twists the styles and finds its own language in which jazz and hip-hop intertwine.
Most of the time this music seems breathless, the supposedly quiet moments are all the stronger: “The Lava Is Calm” begins as futuristic bar jazz, before psych guitars invade the middle part and the piece fades out with a nebulous Tropicália mood. Equally beguiling is the last song “Going Up”, an R’n’B ballad with a beautiful chorus, sung by Francis & The Lights, whose velvety voice hasn’t been heard in a long time.