Débruit - Spatio Temporel EP

At his worst, Paris based Debruit has way too much style for his own good.  Like so many other would be hip hop producers lacking an MC who's brave enough to take chances on anything other than played out R&B samples or club music, Debruit is forced to make lemomade out of pure sugar.  This inevitably means his tracks play out much shorter than their actual length and seem to always end with a whimper, but more importantly they just feel too big for their britches, working a bit too hard to impress.  Debruit's stuff rings in just slightly under the post-Dilla radar for instrumental hip-hop derived electronica which is odd because he quite elegantly combines many of the style traits in vogue at the moment.   Dropping about as many third worldisms as the next man, laying heavy on the P-Funk and wonky off kilter stuff, but with an real ear for the sparsity and robo pop of a neptunes era track, Debruit has a knack for crisp, modish collage.  This is reflected straight down to the album art; a smart, urban update on Picasso.  But there's something more than style here that seems aching to get let out, Debruit wants an audience but he's gotta say something first.  Part of it is just completing his tracks, when your track sounds like it's winding down at 2 minutes, don't make it last for 4 unless you've got some good ideas.  But also, there's something inherently dangerous about flirting so closely with the music of Nigeria, of Persia, of Kingston, of the Congo.  It's not merely a practice of exoticization that today's hip hop finds itself so interested in African and Middle Eastern party music, it's a sub-literal yen for that untraceable element of a culture momentarily unbridled, and in certain cases revolutionarily transfigured through a musical conduit.  In the "West", it all seems like candy: clubs, culture mongering, fashion, dialectic - we consume these as if they were both useless and the only currency available.  Debruit knows how to make a track sufficiently useless, and I mean that in the best sense, but he hasn't been convincing enough in how to make that uselessness matter.

Débruit - K.O. Debout

Débruit - Persian Funk