Do You (Clean)

Chronique

Since offering his first Stones Throw album, Hud Dreems, in 2015, Glen Boothe has snared a Grammy nomination through his contribution to Album of the Year candidate To Pimp a Butterfly (for which he co-produced "Momma"), joined Anderson .Paak under the name NxWorries, and continued to supply his growing base with dozens of smaller-scale digital releases. Boothe's second solo Stones Throw LP, 1988, obviously could not, as his label alleges with a wink, be based on recordings the producer made the year he was born, when he encountered an E-mu SP-12 sampling drum machine. While it's even more tantalizing to imagine the result of Boothe restricting his sources to nothing but recordings from the titular year -- sampling classics by the likes of BDP, Guy, Pebbles, and Super Lover Cee & Casanova Rud -- this is lacking neither imagination nor creativity, and is another transfixing exhibition of the beatmaker's command. The tracks are a little longer on average but still rarely exceed two minutes. What few tracks eclipse the mark never drag. "amansloveislife_keepon," one of two bright moments bringing back vocal trio Kut Klose (1995), coasts in a state of bliss induced by Patrice Rushen's electric piano, while the four-and-a-half-minute "minding_my business," similarly uplifted and rooted in sophisticated funk, is actually a backdrop for free-and-easy vocalists Durand Bernarr and Rose Gold. Among the shorter cuts, there's a dusty soul strutter graced by .Paak, and other beats twist, stammer, and glide, cutting across genres, decades, and moods, smoothed out with transitions involving humorous interview segments, movie clips, and interjections as often as gentle fading.
© Andy Kellman /TiVo