Soundtrack for Sunrise

Album review

With Soundtrack for Sunrise, 20-year-old Gabriel Reyes-Whittaker (aka GB) has created something highly unusual in the dance music world. Not only is his debut album a laid-back, soulful, and funky affair, it's also filled with some of the most structurally complex tracks you're likely to hear on or near a dancefloor. "After All," which opens the album and features the sweet vocals of Joy Jones, is built on a relatively straightforward 4/4 rhythm, but Jones' vocals overlay the beat in such a way as to make it sound as if it were something more irregular -- 5/4 or 7/4. The effect is danceable but kind of unsettling, and thoroughly delightful. The rest of the album doesn't disappoint, either. The sexy electro-Brasiliana of "Livre" features the talents of both Flora Purim and Airto Moreira, and sounds like a weird and wonderful juxtaposition of samba and broken beat electronica; "Black Monolith" is lazy dub-inflected funk laced with subtle turntable flourishes courtesy of Ricci Rucker; "Love Song for Strings, Electric Piano and Sequencing Software" brings in violins, Latin percussion, and a languid trip-hop beat and lets them all amble around companionably for a while, until about one minute before the end of the track -- at which point everything stops, the beat changes entirely (into an eerie sort of lounge/hip-hop groove), and an MC steps in and raps in a hard to identify foreign language (Portuguese? Japanese?) until the end of the track. Craziness. Highly recommended.
© Rick Anderson /TiVo