Posted on 05/06/2008
Taiyo Na has been a fixture on New York City’s theatre and spoken word scene since his teens, but is just now making his debut as a recording artist. With Love is Growth, the singer/song writer/MC establishes himself as a multidimensional talent with a unique creative voice that fuses the rhythms of the city that raised him with the soul of the Asian immigrant culture that birthed him.

 

    Clearly most at home over sinewy funk jams, Na opens the album with a couple of certified neck snappers, “One More Time” and the title cut, which match pounding drums with sharp guitar licks. The throaty sung/chanted vocals of the latter ride the groove a bit better than the will.i.am-esque flow of the former, but both burst from the speakers with passionate adrenaline. Yet, Na is perhaps at his most compelling when he slows things down a bit, and shifts the focus to the vivid characters who populate his world. Na uses the Asian concept of “Kasama” (rebellion) to frame the growth and ulti-mately demise of a teenage romance, rocking a confessional flow over a  mid-tempo neo-soul track. More poignant still, is the guitar and string driven “Lovely To Me (Immi-grant Mother),” the first addition to the canon of single mother tributes to spotlight the challenges of raising a family while negotiating a foreign land (“she’s on the subway, try-ing to learn English/Wishing for her son to be distinguished/There’s lots of things she don’t know how to say/so immigrant mothers, they know how to pray”).

    While Na proves himself to be an eclectic and assured producer (the entire pro-ject is self produced), he is not a particularly agile rapper, or refined vocalist. His vocal limitations are particularly prominent on the ballads, where despite lush instrumentation, his falsetto sounds thin and tentative, ultimately keeping any of the slow jams from be-ing show stoppers (imagine Bilal, or even Van Hunt on the bass heavy grind of “4 Your Love”). Still, Love Is Growth is a soulful debut from an artist capable of carving out a unique niche in the music world.

 

- Jeff Harvey