Posted on 09/14/2005

 

BBE's Beat Generation series has long given hip-hop producers the chance to get their own shine. Nicolay, the Dutch kid who you may know as the producer on the Foreign Exchange gets his chance on City Lights Volume 1.5 (this release adds a few tracks to a previously available mixtape). Unfortunately BBE instrumental albums have occasionally sounded like hip hop's answer to easy listening, and Nicolay's release spends its mellow vibe a little too freely.

Take the Beat Generation's patron saint, Pete Rock; no one would ever deny the seductive quality of his jazzy grooves, but a long player of his chill-out vibe drags after a while. The successes in the series have featured some sort of innovative hook, like King Britt's Brother from Another Planet riff on Adventures in Lo-Fi. Nicolay has come up with the classic album that's good so long as you don't listen to it; in other words, it's driving music, it's make-out music, it's 420 music. This isn't a bad thing; the man has a knack for recreating the essence of soul, magically weaving in Stax horns and vocal backgrounds into effortless grooves, and the tracks blend seamlessly into a nice urban soundtrack.

Unfortunately Nicolay does soul, but he doesn't do variety.

Hi-hat, kick, snare. The same drumbeat permeates most of the 20 tracks on the album, and that sort of tedium doesn't fly without dope MCs at least alleviating the monotony. When Nicolay breaks with the generic boom bap, he comes up with unique presentations: the strutting percussion on "Indian Summer" blends finger snaps, cowbells, and the urban mutterings of kids playing, water flowing, birds whistling into a sumptuous track that has vibe oozing out of the speaker grill. "We Can Fly" flips some kind of funky alien disco jazz that I like to think of as an alternate soundtrack to "The Greatest American Hero"; your mental references may vary. The man can make beats, but I'd rather hear an album with 10 different tracks than 15 of the same mixed with a couple of standouts.

It's tricky, especially for hip-hop loop diggers, to make an instrumental album that doesn't drag. Random bits of entertainment help; City Lights features a running skit involving answering machines and messages about "calling a minute ago about a message I left two hours ago, which was about something five minutes ago". It's more amusing on the album, honest, but not nearly enough. Ultimately in an example of the most undermining moniker ever, this album hosted by Lunchbox tha Narcoleptic does succeed in putting the listener to sleep more often than it should.

Stay tuned for my next review, where I mix in a joke about a priest, a rabbi, and Busta Rhymes. Thank you!