Erykah Badu & The Alchemist
Before the World Blows
CONTROL FREAQ/YOUNG
Held up from release for what seems like years, the righteous pairing of Erykah Badu’s earthen but aggressively jazzy vocals and self-contemplative storytelling with The Alchemist’s apocalyptic, sampledelic, cinematic production techniques on Before the World Blows is everything you hoped it could be, then more. With each innovative album since 2003’s Worldwide Underground, Badu’s sounds and visions have increasingly blossomed into wilder studies of psychedelic rumination—a lyrical and literally post-jazz take on what Miles Davis started sonically with Bitches Brew, further emboldened by hip-hop at its steamiest (check out how “I Just Play a Part” on her new album interpolates Teo Macero into its mix). It should be equally noted how The Alchemist has also grown more psychotropic and thematic since 2016’s The Silent Partner, his album with Mobb Deep’s Havoc.
With that, both of Before the World Blows’s artist-partners have come into their newest project with mind expansion and mood-music making on their docket. What The Alchemist does with Badu’s brand of neo-soul psychedelic shack-up, however, is explode those ideas—the spells she puts upon her victims on the slow-pulsing “Witch Doctor,” the dangerous love affair of “Valentine” and its thrumming blues, the post-prog romanticism of “They Ain’t You,” the synergistic funk of “Next 2 You”—into something radically asymmetrical, yet still benefiting from Badu’s secret weapon: syrupy smart and contagious melody. It’s her capacity for epic songcraft that turns “Black Box” from berserk jazz, and “To the Moon (Plan C)” from analog fusion-gospel complexity, into strangely steamy and furiously unique R&B.
Badu and The Alchemist may have welcomed appropriate party guests such as Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Thundercat, Jay Electronica, Westside Gunn, DRAM, and Earl Sweatshirt into their larger world-making project, but ultimately, theirs is an intimate, inventive universe all of their own making.
