Westernization Completed

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Steps above the fine Head Slash Bauch, AGF focuses sonically and thematically with her 2003 follow-up, Westernization Completed. Where Head Slash Bauch was fractured into small little bits, Westernization Completed keeps things a bit chunkier. That doesn't mean that she doesn't cut and filter most of her patches, it's just that sounds are allowed to expel and then sit out there for a few moments and then float away, or where there were some implied beats in her previous record, here she explores them a bit further and lets them live and drive. "Refail," a serious highlight, has a very legitimate hip hop feel while AGF weaves in and around, finding all the little gaps to explore ideas and comment on life in the global society. And that's the real growth here -- her themes are fully explored. She's a poem producer now; she's taken the abstract and realized it, letting her phrases speak and say something, not just resorting to throwing out strings of words. There's conviction and passion in her words and she sets her sonic explorations to prop them up. With Westernization Completed, AGF takes the unsettling warmth of Head Slash Bauch and does something amazing with it.

© Sam Samuelson /TiVo