The Heavy Merges Power Soul, Hip-Hop

[Remy Schneider, Morphizm]

The Heavy, The House That Dirt Built
First listen Sentence Fragment:
Garage-funktronic swing sung by a testosterone-injected Nina Simone.
Further Analysis:
The House That Dirt Built morphs freakishly into an exquisite hybrid of sound and influences in a vibrant slash-and-spray crashing with beautiful color. To say Kelvin Swaby’s vocals are plagued with multiple-personality disorder is putting it quite mildly. I would lean towards multiple-demon possession.

Kelvin Swaby’s voice is clear and vivid my mind. His patterns spill and splatter on the canvas, taking the shape of Al Green, Little Richard and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. If you see sound as the sum of its components, the sources and influences could be a collection of distortions, the known gathering of atoms which alone have unique identities and purposes but, when fused, may birth a revolution.

In this instance, I think by some miracle it’s a mixture. One song is a complete creation of new sound, the following is an ornately dismantled chimera. The sultry, marble highs fall out of the sky and grace on the sticky “Sixteen,” dropping intrigue like “She looks like heaven but her mind reeks of hell.” “Love Like That” and “How You Like Me Now” finds Swaby sounding like Freddy Cannon in a roid rage, on an American Bandstand stage above a sea of twirling teenagers. This is all evidence of superb versatility, in Swaby’s vocal schizophrenia and the ability of the instrumentation to incubate it. The guitar and bass riffs, Sinatra-tromboning, cello-bellowing, hi-hat-tapping, snare-smashing, ivory-tickling and trumpet-squealing create excellent musical textures, brilliant stratifications of complexity. It’s the type of polyphonic complication that I crave. Simple synthesizer beats do not fire neurons with as much passion as hearing an orchestra you can nod your head to.

The Heavy recalls Mos Def’s Black Jack Johnson as much as the The Roots, whose 100 percent hip-hop was born from organic instruments for Black Thought’s raps. But The Heavy are also truly a rock band, embedding powerful sound in phat beats.

But they also deliver some lackluster nonsense. The metronomic blaster “No Time” is relatively unremarkable. “Cause for Alarm” is a bland but moderately catchy ska skank, forced and repetitive.

The Bottom Line:
This album is a multiracial baby made in the phone booth from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure that got stuck in the swing. If you have a couple bucks to spare, its a good buy but a fantastic torrent. You will be left soaked with satisfaction, each pore dripping like welfare lines in thunderstorms.