Posted on 07/27/2005

 

There's just some music that exists. It's not offensively bad, nor is it excessively good. It's just kind of there. And while it's playing, it doesn't really impress anyone enough to pay closer attention and it certainly doesn't disgust anyone enough to shut it off. Upon forcing myself to listen to the James Hardway Collective's latest album, Over Easy, I thought one thing: they certainly got the title right. The entire record sounds like it went from start to finish in one recording session. Surrounded by clashing, out-of-key vocal melodies and harmonies and a rapper who sounds like he's permanently stuck in 1991, the band (which is a four person band with Mr. Hardway playing seven out of the 10 employed instruments) prances and whirls around a hybrid of modern jam-band funk and quasi-European club music.

It's hard to distinguish between tracks: they all run about three and a half to four minutes in length, have a slow rhythm behind D Booker's all-over-the-place vocals and then switch to a double-time rhythm when rapper Krishna steps in to ramble on about a bunch of nothing. At times, D Booker's vocals seem so mismatched with the backing tracks that it's conspiratorially possible she recorded to different backing tracks. Krishna's raps are just so clichéd and boring that if they aren't improvised, they must have been written only a few minutes before the tape was running. In both cases, their vocals are entirely too loud, which is a shame because the accompanying music is far more interesting than what they both have to say.

With that being said, the instrumental work is just fine for what its worth. It's repetitive and simplistic by nature, thus guaranteed to crumble if asked to stand alone. When it's all said and done, this group has obviously found a nice little groove for themselves and stayed there. It works well enough on the surface but upon further inspection, the musical shortcomings and underdeveloped ideas (and lack of good ideas to begin with) are inherent.