Review: Future Brown - Future Brown
By Eli Schoop, Contributor
[Warp; 2015]
Rating: 7/10
Key Tracks: “Big Homie,” “No Apology,” “Killing Time”
Supergroup is as supergroup does. As much a product of the Internet as it is a product of musical trends in 2015, Future Brown comes packaged with a forthright, ambitious mindset that screams avant-garde. Composed of post-Internet wunderkind Fatima al Qadiri, Lit City Trax founder J-Cush and the duo of Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda, aka Nguzunguzu, this quartet is brimming with ideas and bursting with potential in its self-titled LP.
This is music that's futuristic in intent but packed with modes and methodology straight from the present. Future Brown’s highlighting of unsung trap artists such as Tink and Sicko Mobb is particularly inspired, culminating in collaborations that force a particular mood straight onto the listener each time. “Big Homie” is one of those songs, pairing Sicko Mobb's schizophrenia as a rap form with the straight-up steel drum grooves provided by Future Brown, which proves as inspiring as it is unreplicable. This is trap music logged-in and synthesized by the immense power of the World Wide Web.
Surprisingly, no Future Brown artist's specific identity gets in the way or clouds their signifiers on the project. With such prolific artists as these on the roster, it's intriguing that the hyperreal stylings of al Qadiri or kinetic outbursts of the Nguzunguzu duo aren’t more heavily emphasized. An amorphous blob of influences and mechanisms are cobbled together, not necessarily in a bad way, but a way that's less easily identifiable as the quartet’s own.
In any case, what's made here is certainly creative as hell and incessantly worked-upon, as if the producers didn't sleep while they made this project. From the reggaeton lunacy of songs like “No Apology” to the wicked and chilled tones prominent in “Killing Time,” this is not a brightly-colored album. It evokes warehouse raves but instead of neon lights and dancing, the warehouse is full of construction work and this music is blaring over the loudspeakers.
2015 has certainly had its share of banger-filled albums, but none so far have been as diverse and uncompromising as Future Brown's first output. While not the most cohesive work, it lays down an interesting framework on which to build upon, seemingly endless judging from the prodigal minds that make up the group. By using a boatload of features comprised of genres far and wide (grime, bop, trap), Future Brown creates and peruses musical landscapes previously unseen in hip-hop, stylistically. Let us welcome the global revolution, spearheaded by Future Brown.
