Anderson .Paak — Oxnard ANALYSIS & REVIEW
Published 12/01/2018
Here’s another example this year of someone explicitly borrowing from past popular styles because the style was, well, fun and exciting. On a basic level, this album succeeds at laying down the foundations of what makes music “funky”: strong reliance on the 7th as a color tone, succinct and melodic brass parts, upbeat and diverse percussion, the slightest of offbeat accents, and a cool wavy synth as the main harmonic provider. Then, add in a melodic layer comprised mostly of rap techniques, and you get a postmodern work that combines the past and present in a neatly obvious way, not focused on any specific metacultural purpose but instead just being organic, thoughtful music. I shouldn’t really have to explicitly point to that as a positive trait, as it should be a given. However, in 2018, it’s not. Perhaps the best general aspect about this album is the refreshing feeling it gives off as being rooted in its fundamental composition over any extraneous goal. In that way, multiple levels of emotion were able to be conveyed.
It’s unfortunately nothing I’m too head over heels for, though, and that really only comes down to one glaring negative: melodic rhythm. With all that this album did well to possibly ignite strong feelings of reminiscence or basic movement, it fell a bit short overall with solo vocals sticking to rather simple repetitions, strict eighth note patterns, and when sung, staying within an innocuous pentatonic scale. While I commend the attempted mixing of past and present techniques, this album simply came to be strong funk backgrounds of the past mixed with some uninteresting formulaic melodic tropes of the present.
Nothing was ever disgraceful, though; the worst it ever got was the unchanging slow rhythm and lack of melodic form when trying to follow the complicated chorus harmonies in the song “Headlow”. Everything was still rather colorful, easy flowing, and range appropriate. What Kendrick Lamar was able to do on his guest verse in “Tints”, though, showed exactly what this album missed most: potency and vivacity in metric manipulation and rhythmic patterns worth remembering. Anderson .Paak, while showing ambition in other places, was not able to fill this particular hole himself. That is, except for the song “Cheers”, my favorite song on the album due to Anderson finding purposeful driving rhythm in the form of density from his 2nd verse to the end.
Other than relying on plain rhythms in the vocals too much, this was a neat and worthwhile listen. In recent memory, this is some of the coolest instrumental funk I’ve heard that’s come out in modern times. A big reason was that the texture was rarely ever busy. Instrumental roles were kept rather delicate and at a minimum, having one little line or doing one little job to fit in and build a smooth, connected track without any hiccups in odd dynamics or misplaced colors.
Everything about the timbre had purpose and brought something of importance to the song. Sure, there were a few moments of standstill, more than I would’ve liked, in the middle of the album between “Savior’s Road” and “Trippy” where the sound stopped adding noticeable instrumental features and stuck with one texture for the whole track. Those textures were still feel-good, groovy, and sleek to a fine point, from a basic piano trio to a hard-hitting beat. The timbral highlight was actually in the first track, “The Chase”, with the wonderfully active flute providing a new and unexpected edge of excitement. I wish more far-fetched textural additions such as this would have been done throughout, but the sonic atmosphere was still quite delightful. It’s not quite solid, but it’s a commendable success and a good one time listen, perhaps more if you can look past the sometimes sluggish vocal rhythms.
