Some mornings I find myself reaching for an instrumental record because they’re easy. Easy on the ears. Easy on the attention span. Easy to sum up. Either the beats are dope… Relaxing… Exciting… Or they aren’t. Either they make your head nod or they don’t. There are no lyrics to analyze or voices to critique. It’s pretty simple, right?
Yeah, well not so much.
Sometimes beatmakers, especially particularly talented or ambitious ones, make music that’s far more complicated than all that. I came to that realization this morning as the sounds of Standing On the Shoulders of Giants, the new LP from Metaform, a producer who splits his time between Los Angeles, San Francisco and Tokyo, flooded out of my speakers. Did I say something about not having to analyze voices on an instrumental album? Well, there’s plenty of them on Standing On the Shoulders of Giants. And I’m not talking about the vocal samples (drawn from movies, songs and other sources) that float in and out of the mix either. I’m talking about the voices of musical instruments, and lots of them.
Though his production style is built on a foundation of gritty sampled drum breaks and an array of samples from diverse sources, Metaform’s beats are multi-layered with tons of (often familiar) melody and harmonic interplay between different instrument samples, vocal samples and what sounds like live instrumentation. This aesthetic leaves Standing On the Shoulders of Giants coming off like a collection of dusty head-nodders imbued with a patchwork prettiness. It’s eerie, and almost supernatural how the disparate tones come together to make music that sounds so beautiful and so dangerous… Kinda like Dr. Victor Frankenstein had he made a really sexy lady monster out of all those scavenged bits of corpse… Or those two nerds when they made a magical Kelly LeBrock on their computer in Weird Science.
Fans of DJ Shadow and RJD2 still sore over those guys’ forays into Hyphy and Power-Pop respectively should welcome Metaform’s arrival with open arms and ears. And whether you dig moody downtempo numbers or dramatic uptempo arm-wavers the kid’s got you covered, and then some. The former is best exemplified by the thunderous “Brick and Mortar,” which flips crashing drums, sampled wails & soulful harmonizing, fuzzy synths and bells, the jazzy vibe, piano & bass loops and disembodied vocals of “Lonely Boy,” and “Barbie Doll,” another synth-fueled banger with a variety of string loops, a soulful horn breakdown and a haunting chopped vocal hook. While the Coming to America-sampling “I Feel Good,” with it’s layered hand-drums, breakbeats, undulating bassline, organ & guitar samples and big horn break, the ethereal “Apache”-driven “Sunday,” and “Heaven Can Wait,” with it’s horror movie-meets-Classical music piano loops, atmospheric woodwinds, layered breaks and filtered vocal hook are emblematic of the latter.
Metaform “Barbie Doll”
In between the two extremes you’ll find the very RJD2-esque “Crush,” the soulful “Bubblegum,” the Drum-n-Bass-meets-acoustic-Folk-and-Psyche-Rock tempo-change madness of “Pch,” the Gypsy guitar pluckery of “Deep Concentration,” minimalist IDM melding with retro Electro on the album closer “Love and Loss,” and cooing female vocals and Soul loops on the heavenly album opener “Rock It Number Nine.” Not to mention an armload of shorter, almost skit-length concoctions that fit chopped samples and familiar loops to neck snapping drum breaks of every stripe.
Music this pretty is undoubtedly easy. Easy to listen to. Easy like a weekend morning spent with Lionel Richie and friends even. But wrapping ones head around the process of making it. Of compiling the source material. Of the love and attention to detail that went into crafting it. And even of the blood, sweat and tears that the artists (the “giants” whose shoulders Metaform is standing on I assume) whose work the samples were culled from shed is a bit more arduous a task for sure.