Paul White - Rapping With Paul White

  • Share
  • Paul White is a South London based hip-hop producer who easily could have been cast aside in a world full of press releases that abuse the phrase "post-Dilla." But rather than just pairing blunted beats and cracking, off-kilter snares, he's steadily amassed a growing fan base by injecting a psychedelic, disjointed and quite often humourous take on the genre. Previous work has seen him plundering prog and psych for his dense productions. Rapping with Paul White is him trying something completely different. The album takes seven mostly unknown MCs and inserts them into White's strange dreams. The results are dazzling. There's calming, meditative moods on instrumental opener "Right On," and the poetic closer "Wily Walruses." Stark, ethereal and paranoid moments come from Jehst's "Indigo Glow" and the somewhat underwhelming lead single "Trust" featuring Guilty Simpson. There's also some pretty filthy stuff, said in ways we're not familiar with: Danny Brown's original flow on "One of Life's Pleasures" is an orgiastic feast of flesh, drugs and arrogance over a beat that goes from classic American Rock to mad-minute video game music. Similarly, Moe Pope's wonderfully titled "Stampeding Elephants" sees White taking on a boisterous Afrobeat motif while Pope compares standing out in a crowded rap market to the hierarchy of the jungle. Homeboy Sandman takes on the idiosyncrasies of British culture from the perspective of an outsider American. The album's strongest moment comes from Tranqill, who, over a pitched-up power rock ballad and the most exciting use of a sustained feeding-back guitar chord since Ghostface Killah's "We Celebrate," absolutely dominates the mic, menacing sub-standard MCs with such conviction it sounds like he might jump out of the speakers and have a stern word for you too. Similar to Madlib's WLIB effort for BBE's Beat Generation series, this album assembles a motley crew of unique and individual MCs and somehow makes them seem like a unit under the direction of White. Producer LPs often stumble due to a lack of cohesiveness, which more often that not comes from the anti-chemistry of swapping beats and vocals online. With a number of "did he just say that?" moments and more than a few quotables, Rapping with Paul White combines a series of moods and ideas and ties them together with quirky skits and a varied palate of samples, all with the charm we've grown to expect from White.
  • Tracklist
      01. Intro: We Make A Lot Of Noise 02. Right On 03. Trust feat. Guilty Simpson 04. Run Shit feat. Marv Won 05. One Of Life's Pleasures feat. Danny Brown 06. The Doldrums 07. Life Is Flashing Interlude 08. Stampeding Elephants feat. Moe Pope 09. Rotten Apples feat. Tranqill 10. Thirty Days 11. A Weird Day feat. Homeboy Sandman 12. African New Wave 13. Indigo Glow feat. Jehst 14. Dirty Slang feat. Guilty Simpson 15. A New Way 16. Evasive Action 17. Wily Walruses feat. Nancy Elizabeth 18. Outro: We'll Never End
RA