Posted on 06/09/2008
Attention college event planning committee members: if you haven’t already held your campus’s Spring Fling Concert, what the blood clot are you waiting for? School has been out for weeks! Secondly, you need to book Hyphen-One & Daylow, quick, fast, in a hurry. The organic jazz-funk grooves and playful melodies displayed on their full-length debut, Ill Regular would make the perfect soundtrack to your marijuana fueled day of outdoor revelry.

A ten-piece funk band in a Pro-Tools world, Hyphen-One & Daylow take full advantage of their ensemble, crafting a loose and lively record rich with chord progressions and eclectic genre hopping that sounds good in the headphones, but begs to be brought to life in a concert setting. Need some cultural reference points to sell your fellow committee members? Think Black Eyed Peas sans the corny commercialism and Fergie’s Adam’s Apple. A couple of spins of the title cut, with it’s funk-lite instrumentation, sing-songy rap flow and goofily catchy chorus will drive your point home. Refer the hipsters to “I Remember,” and make sure they note the light hearted jazz-hop, reminiscent of Do You Want More?!!!??! era Roots with a west coast twist. Assuming your colleagues are of standard college age (quite the leap of faith with planning committees, I know), they probably aren’t very familiar with N’Dea Davenport era Brand New Heavies, but use the reference anyway, when hipping them to “Daylow,” a mid-tempo neo-soul groove taken into the stratosphere by the hypnotic vocals of Aqesha “Q” Ritzie.

By album’s end, the band has established its own brand of musically sophisticated whimsicality, exemplified on “We Won’t Tell,” which begins as a brooding jazz burner and somehow morphs into an Afro Cuban workout, sure to have your campus’s happy-go-lucky hippie chicks grinding on the nearest ethnic dude or white cat with dreads.

The vocals, handled mostly by Hyphen-One probably won’t impress the American Idol watching sorority girls in the crowd, and the lyrics aren’t likely to spark any social revolutions or spiritual epiphanies, but this is Spring Fling you’re booking, not a “Free Tibet” rally. You want a band that will bring a free-wheeling, jam session sensibility and an unapologetic mastery of the art of moving butts, so score Hyphen-One and Daylow, or at least cop the CD and host the hottest damn dorm party of Fall semester.

- Jeff Harvey