Quick Hits: TQ – Paradise

So tomorrow, April 29th, marks the long-awaited (by some) return of crooner TQ to the R&B game, as he releases his 4th official album, Paradise (EMI 2008). To remind those who may have forgotten — or to inform those who weren’t paying attention — it was 1999 when TQ burst onto the R&B scene with his first single, “Westside,” a soulful homage to the West Coast hip hop scene and its most representative rappers, Eric “Eazy-E” Wright and Tupac Shakur.

TQ was a rather unique commodity when he first arrived in ’99, one of the few proprietors of what might best be described as “Thug R&B,” paving the way for artists like Jaheim. His lyrics told street-worthy stories and used street-worthy language to do so. In fact, it was likely the hip hip vernacular TQ employed on “Westside” that kept the street anthem from climbing the U.S. charts. In other words, TQ was quite the departure from the then-popular R&B of K-Ci & JoJo, Usher, and Next, who hit big with “All My Life,” “You Make Me Wanna,” and “Too Close,” (aka the bane of high school principals everywhere) respectively.

After a few early spins of Paradise, it’s clear that TQ hasn’t abandoned his signature Thug R&B style, which is good to hear, as the album opens with the title track, “Paradise”: I grew up in the middle of a war zone, in a place where all reasoning was long gone / California dreamin’ was nightmares, and it shook a nigga straight to the bone. The second track, “Soulja,” follows the same road: This is the story, of a soldier / Cuz it takes one, just to know one / And it’s no fun, gotta fight on, like the Trojans / Come on holler if you hear me tonight. And of course, there are thug ballads too, including “Ebony Eyes” and “Ain’t The Same,” both of which are astonishingly honest and frank for a “thug.”

But two of the best, and most intriguing, tracks on Paradise are TQ’s renditions — or perhaps “appropriations” is the better word — of “Proud Mary,” which was written in 1969 by John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and “A Little Bit of Love” by New Edition circa 1986. Of course TQ puts his thug spin on both tracks, and somehow, both songs just…work, which is really quite a feat considering neither CCR’s nor New Editions’ styles were anything like TQ’s.

It will be interesting to see how Paradise is received by an R&B marketplace now dominated by the soft-core likes of Chris Brown, Ne-Yo, Mario, T-Pain, and, well…..Justin Timberlake. Yikes. Personally, I’m glad to get back to some good old-fashioned, grown-man R&B about man stuff, and away from the scrawny, eighteen-year -old, manufactured pop sensations who can’t be bothered to write their own material.

But will anyone else be?

TQ’s Official MySpace

– Jonathan

Battles Live: Human After All?

Despite all the acclaim their debut album, Mirrored, received last year, math rock outfit Battles still has their share of detractors. To some, listening to Mirrored was a cold, dead experience as their music lent almost very little, if any, soul or emotion. Fair, I say, but that does not make it any less of an incredible recording.

If anything, the vocals that multi-instrumentalist Tyondai Braxton (son of Anthony, the legendary saxophonist) lends to the songs makes their latest material far more accessible to the listener than the purely instrumental material released almost 4 years ago on the EP C and B EP records. His vocals may be indecipherable, but it adds a human quality that was lacking before. If you were familiar with the band before Mirrored, you were in awe of how precise and monumentally dense the performances were on record, you swore it had to have been done by robots. Daft Punk, eat your heart out.

My first experience with Battles was about 4 years ago when they supported The Icarus Line (remember when Penance Soiree was the shit for about a month?) on tour. Being new to the band when I first saw them, their performance blew me away with how simply incredible they were as musicians. You had to be there: my jaw hit the floor when Braxton and Ian Williams played the exact same melody on their keyboard while fingerpicking their guitars at the same time. John Stainer was an absolute beast on the drums. Watching them was like staring in awe at an enormous machine run like clockwork. But all the while the band hardly addressed the semi-hostile crowd, with the only acknowledgment coming in the form of garbled vocals from Braxton in between songs.

Fast-forward to last Wednesday night as Battles performed for a private audience at 86 in Hollywood as a warm-up for their Coachella gig that coming weekend. Fresh off their newfound fame from Mirrored, they breezed through a set off the album, including “Atlas,” “Leyendecker,” and the monstrous “Tonto.” Having seen them before I was knew what I was getting, but what amazed me most was how loose the band looked despite their music’s call for precision. Despite all the hopping around by Williams and Braxton, the notes came exactly when they were supposed to.

But perhaps the biggest surprise of the night came when Braxton greeted the audience with an unadulterated-by-knobs salute of “Wassup LA!” Battles had tore down the facade once and for all, and showed us that underneath the mechanized output was just some regular guys like you and me. That’s when you took a big sigh of relief and realized to yourself that you had made it out of Uncanny Valley.