"With
this sprawling concept album, Mike Ladd has hit a new career high.
4.5
of 5." —URB
The Father Divine project started two years ago as an attempt to
capture the original, analog-laden ROIR cassette sound (of Bad Brains
& Suicide, of punk & dub) as filtered through Mike Ladd’s
artistic vision:
I’m
not one to be over-enthusiastic about any label I’m working with
but for me ROIR is pretty special considering they put out one of my all-time
favorite albums: Bad Brains. I’ve always loved the grimy, haphazardly
compressed sound of tapes. I still use them in my music and wanted to
capture that on Father Divine.
It
then morphed into a religious cult-figure concept-album (google “Father
Divine” to learn more). However, during the recording process life
stepped in and whisked Mike away to Paris (for love, of course) and rewarded
him w/ a wife & child.
Extreme
change makes one reflect on one’s life and often opens new creative
avenues. For example, Mike explains, “Now that I’m safely
married, I find it easier to write about girls.” Father Divine has two classic girl tracks (“Barney’s Girl” and “Murder
Girl”). They, along with a few others, are great examples of Mike
making peace with a former life. “Apt C2” is at once a requiem
for his Bronx apt and a tentative hello to his new life in Paris. Father
Divine is pregnant with personal imagery of Mike’s past, as
well as his trademark political fury toward the present and inimitable
visions of the afterfuture.
Father
Divine is also an album with big, BIG MOJO. It’s easily Mike’s
hottest, dirtiest-sounding album yet. There’s that ROIR sound—of
anger and fun and dirt—plus there’s a bit of that Father
Divine mystique and dubby echo which adds some spookiness (all good
records need it). And it’s all burning. Father Divine is
the sound of dirt burning up.
That
has a lot to do with Mike, but also with his collaborators. On Father
Divine, Mike worked with Priest (of Antipop Consortium) on synth,
Pianist Vijay Iyer, ROIR artist Raz Mesinai a/k/a Badawi (dubs & percussion),
Damali Young on drums & guitar, Dave “Eastwood” Sztanke
on keys, and Jaleel Bunton (of TV On The Radio) on guitar.
But
his main man on Father Divine is a Spanish/French kid from Southern
France mysteriously named Gymkhana, whose studio is an analog lover’s
dream. Much of the production work was done there, as well as Mike’s
home studio, and one can hear a slightly meatier sound on Father Divine as compared to Mike’s other work. Mike describes Gymkhana as “an
experimental electronic maestro whose sensibility ended up colliding with
my off-kilter pop sensibility in some interesting ways.” Indeed.
The
supreme instance of this collision is the epic “Crooner Island”,
which ranks as the strongest instrumental track in Mike’s entire
oeuvre. Gymkhana’s excellent keyboard work grounds Mike’s
stuttering beats at the beginning of the song then grows increasingly
playful before blasting off for the finale. Other tracks, such as “Awful
Raw” & “Murder Girl” (which sounds like a lost Prince
gem), exhibit bombastic production and lyrical bravado unique to Father
Divine. It might have you screaming “gotta get your channel
on” before long.
Of
all the voices to emerge from the hip hop underground in the past couple
of years, Mike Ladd possibly represents the scene's creative apex. —The Wire (UK)
Imagine
a more authentically-down Beck with an even stranger aberrant imagination. —Select Magazine (UK)
In
a hip-hop world ruled by the herd mentality, Mike Ladd stands alone. —BBC
(Mike
Ladd) has managed to perfectly refract the stoned radicalism, the tripped-out
freakism, the politicized party jams of Clinton's funkadelia through a
hip hop lens... a happy reminder of how sonically funked-up and darkly
humorous the underground can get.—NME
