Album Review: RHYTHM & MELODY by Sango
On his debut for Mass Appeal, the Seattle producer runs Detroit rap, New Orleans bounce, Chicago footwork, and Rio funk through one set of top-tier drums. Every guest here performs on his terms.
Soulection started building their audience from beat tapes and radio mixes out of Los Angeles, and the best crates of that collective belonged to a producer from Seattle. Throughout the 2010s, Sango flips Rio funk carioca in his Da Rocinha series, and the North tapes keep the rap and R&B parts of the catalog split geographically, years before Brazilian drums got used in American rap music as an accent. On RHYTHM & MELODY, the debut for Mass Appeal, he splits this catalog further and pushes the idea to its logical conclusions: two discs and a changing lineup of performers from Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, D.C., and Rio, all of whom get put into pockets designed for their native cities, everything connected by the drums unique to no other.
Michigan gets the most mileage here. The end of “I-96” assures that “Anything on this side of the Mississippi is going down,” and Detroit rappers nearby back up the promise. Boldy James plays the grim loop of “Fenkell Ave Interlude” at his usual even pace, pledging he’ll be the one “to tell your son I killed his daddy” alongside “Scorpion on my Sauconys,” while Ab-Liva digs deeper into the pocket: “Trap lord, crack lord/Reagan era, wiretap.” The darkest lyrics on the rap part belong to “The Cold.” G.T. opens this song on “Wake up to sirens, concrete lullabies” and gets through the fatherless childhood until “No father to show me, I became the God” sounds absolutely factual. Babyface Ray follows at his easy, behind-the-beat flow, watching a friend losing himself under the fame, “Ever since the fame came he ain’t been his self,” and Julian Andretti ends up with lovers covered in sheets and a warning that thinking something like that out here will rot your teeth. This song opens MELODY disc, which proves right away that Sango sees the split as emphasis, and he bends it whenever he wants to.
The most tender assignment among the rappers goes to Big Sean. “Big Little Lies” relies on Mary J. Blige’s “Not Gon’ Cry,” and Sean goes through his first verse outside his own story, describing a woman who is “done with niggas who energy can’t even match,” who “still feel the phantom pain from the ones before that scarred her” as a man left her during the postpartum period. His second verse brings him back into the story he was telling: “You’re on me, then you’re off me, swear you treat me like a trend,” and Mary J. Blige, chopped and looped, ends up being the voice of the woman from the first verse. Big Sean bends her hook into “No hurt, no cry over big little lies” and lets the borrowed grief hang under the most patient storytelling he has done in a while.
Halfway through the second disc, Luccas Carlos starts singing in Portuguese. “Sol No RJ” is a night-out seduction: “Então, bebê, se joga/Porque hoje faz sol no RJ,” go ahead and jump in, the sun is out in Rio, and Sango’s percussion makes the funk carioca feel as alive as it did in Da Rocinha days without a hint of tourism. HaSizzle performs “St. Claude” as a bounce veteran, calling a room to order with “Work it, work it, work it, work it, work it with your back,” and Sango leaves the New Orleans framework intact instead of polishing it for the foreigners. Smino bridges the gap between rap and singing on “Duet,” stretching “Make a melody together, baby, let’s do it” to the point of turning this phrase into a flirtation and a studio invitation at once. “I Finally Found the Words to Say” takes the dance part through Chicago, where the hook reduces courting to numbers, “Say two one nine, two three two six, two nine three,” and Vince Ash keeps his voice weighted so that the twitching footwork grid cannot consume him.
Mid-argument with himself is what GoldLink expends in “I Called” doing. Ting Ting calls as soon as he lands; he swears, “I think I found my soulmate last night,” then admits that he went shaky at twenty-nine when a woman asked him about a wedding. He jumps with a sure hand on the trigger to last night’s all-black outfit to the ex-wife who found herself another guy and just gave birth. Sango puts this whole story into one of the most springy pockets here, bright melodic chords and bounce made for dancing as GoldLink talks himself into a spiral.
Phabo opens the door to the singing part of the album at the end of RHYTHM disc, describing Los Angeles around a “Westside shorty” who “grew up off Western” and stays unimpressed by sections and Rollie chains, and pointing to the place: “Meet me in Altadena.” The singers following him keep falling back into temptation. Jaymin spends “Settle” walking back through the door he swore shut, “Swore I wouldn’t ever be back, but I’m back somehow,” and bargaining himself down to “I’ll settle for tonight, we may not get tomorrow.” On “Lucky I,” Xavier Omär sings what staying together costs, “What I sacrifice/Don’t cost money, but it’s not that cheap,” while Dave B. evaluates the alternative and brushes it aside, “Prolly a little more rich and more sane, but I’m sayin’ I’d rather have her.”
Jay Anthony slides in and out of “G.O.” on the same rhyme sound where the slack comes early on the first disc, “All this drip on me, bitch, lick it off,” and never thickens it past that. LAZA coasts on one manifestation prayer throughout “I Pray for This,” and the Visa-passport-Amex chorus burns out before even a verse with a Timmy T punchline should let it. Sango makes his no-guest tracks last. “Out With the New in With the Old” introduces him before the rapper has arrived, a dusty old-soul loop freshened by precise drum programming, and he uses “Be the Light That You Are” as the brighter, slower breath between flexes. He steps out of “More Than Anything” on a studio track of chatter and somebody saying “This is my dream” to the last beat with no feature in sight.
All of that Sango does collapses into “Rain & Shine.” Robb Bank$ begins the song bruised and grandiose, “I’m writing these verses in blood, I already be gone by the time the ink done dried,” and claims Michigan “like the Pistons” as a Florida rapper from a distance. Then Sango flips the beat beneath him, and Sir Michael Rocks saunters in, threatening to “exercise my options” if he isn’t signed, and reports that his “Mexican rich friend say he gon’ buy him a brick if the Sox win.” One beat, restructured mid-song, holding two types of cool without letting either drop. Sango has been recharting maps like this since the beat tape era; this time he scheduled every flight at once.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “The Cold,” “Sol No RJ,” “St. Claude”