Sometimes that producer-emcee link comes along that shows you what true artistic conjunction is, and it couldn’t be more easily put than through the language of Apollo Brown and O.C.’s most recent collaboration Trophies.
From “The Pursuit” to “Fantastic,” Trophies is lyrically relentless, with O.C. rarely taking moments to breathe, and maintaining an elevated stratum of vocabulary that echoes back to the mastery first established ’94 with Word…Life; anything lesser than an emcee of his pedigree would devalue the momentum. The bars topically range from self-pursuit, outwardly thrown introspection (“Fantastic”), social details (“Nautica” playing on the symbols within the Hurricane Irene fiasco in the boroughs back in August) and the life narrative, collectively fashioning a sundry ware that reaches on several levels toward your genres of listeners. There's a clear self inside the rhymes, everything outside of punchline rap and hook-centered construction, the idea that every emcee claims to accomplish, but only few actually produce.
In terms of memorabilia, “Prove Me Wrong” is musically inexhaustible, as O.C. and Apollo find a faultless artistic harmony that plays off perfectly against the hammering pace of “Disclaimer” and astral “Angel’s Sing.” Equilibrium is a key factor in Trophies, and throughout the 16 set tracklist, Apollo and O.C. respectively construct a proper balance of recessions and swells that stray the records from redundancy. This isn’t an album with the typical mid-tracklist sinkhole or boredom black holes--your attention span is kept on focus from opening to endnote, with every detail playing relative to another.
Apollo Brown continues to prove himself to be a boardmaster of underrated brilliance, crafting a complex range of sounds such as those on “The Pursuit” and “Signs” marked with moments evoking emotional tones to match O.C.’s lyrical context, as well as creating atmospheres to spawn and harbor personalized nostalgias in each listener. The description may sound hyperbolized, but the truth is that Apollo Brown really is that good. His ear for string and horn marriages is a skill to be envied (“The Formula” and “Options” are premier evidence), and easily touches the rungs only the excellent stand upon. His touch for samples retains a personalized polish and rawness, creating a sense of both dragging and forward place that provide a strange note that can't be defined, but surely is acknowledged.
There’s nothing experimentative or aberrational in Trophies; the sounds are purely hip-hop fundamentals, and the pair of skill sets in Apollo and O.C. showcase the truth that basic elements are all that’s necessary to produce quality. While records like “Options,” “We The People” and “Trophies” philosophize on the steering of the human spirit and sociopolitical issues, the whole of Trophies is, outside of an analytical level, a collection of sounds that make the fastforward button obsolete. The fingerprints of a grandiose design are rare, and the main ideology behind the project seems only set to show a hip-hop that continues to glamorize itself with grandiloquent instrumentals and character gimmicks that the list of necessities for legendary output still resides in the genre’s roots, the place where pricetags only apply to the tools, where the MPC, microphone, mixer and mind are the way.
SumOlogy: Apollo Brown and O.C. are elite, and in case you don’t know, Trophies will show you.
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Follow JT Langley on Twitter: GlantonSlang
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