Thundercat
Apocalypse [10 Year Anniversary Edition]
BRAINFEEDER
Forever cementing his relationship to lava-like electronic music maker Flying Lotus while signaling his arrival as a focused solo artist (his first album under his Thundercat personae, 2011’s The Golden Age of Apocalypse, was good, not great), Stephen Lee Bruner proved he had a real and human voice as a composer beyond his bubbling bass sound with the release of 2013’s Apocalypse. In celebrating 10 years of funky compositional invention and more genuinely soulful emotion than his FlyLo affiliation had prepared listeners for (Sun Ra–like interplanetary Dada, yes; feeling, no), Bruner offers an extended anniversary look at his first major-chord masterpiece, with two previously unreleased tracks in the silly “Before I Loved myself ‘I’ pooped my ankles (true)” and the not-so-silly “Paris.”
Though he stuck to his guns, happily, with his usual Chris Squire–like prog-squiggle (“Seven”), what pushed Thundercat into a sound beyond Yes-funk dancefloor noodling (“Oh Sheit It’s X”) and space giddiness (“Lotus and the Jondy”) on his sophomore album was a moving and emotive brand of songwriting that touched on his love of his cat (“Tron Song”) and the death of his friend and one-time collaborator Austin Peralta. Across a three-song suite containing more joy and pain than the entirety of the Al Green catalog, a mournful “Tenfold” spills into “Heartbreaks + Setbacks,” while “The Life Aquatic” is its own mini-opera of contagiously rendered, adventure-filled R&B guided by loss.
Rather than just take on the sadness of his friend’s passing, Thundercat’s expressive basslines and beyond encompass the soul of a man with the bittersweet “Without You” and the truly tender closer “A Message for Austin/Praise the Lord/Enter the Void.” I might not know his cat or his late friend, but such mood-swinging music and virtuoso musicianship definitely painted a generous portrait on Thundercat in 2013.
