My Album Of The Week for the week of December 16th-22nd, 2013:
Homeless & The Van Gobots - Twenty-Dirt
It's hip-hop for the second week in a row here on the Flatbasset AOTW. The similarity between Allan Kingdom's Talk To Strangers and this week's Twenty-Dirt is limited strictly to genre defenition.
Homeless (@HomelessRyanK) first came to my attention in August of 2012, when his single "Get Gone" (a collaboration with K.Raydio) turned up on The Current's Song Of The Day podcast (which MinneSarah & I reviewed way back in the second edition of Songs Of The Week. We were so young & naive).
Anyway, that track had Big Cats! on the beat and cast Homeless as an angry, frustrated, but ultimately hopeful young man. Twenty-Dirt takes those same character traits, but stretches them a bit. Homeless is still frustrated, but some of that anger has been replaced with the good humor to recognize which fights are worth fighting. Obviously it's not totally fair to compare a whole album to a lone single, but the lighter moments on Twenty-Dirt certainly give the album a nice balance, letting the listener know that, despite all the problems that surround him, Homeless is still able to enjoy the simple things in life.
In place of a producer on Twenty-Dirt, Homeless collaborated with The Van Gobots (@TheVanGobots). I'd be lying if I said I was super-familiar with their work prior to Twenty-Dirt, but that may be for the best in this instance. The band works up a nice post-punk racket for Homeless' rhymes. Because I'm not familiar with their other work, it's possible for me to listen to these songs without wondering what they would have become without the restraint of the tracks being a canvas rather than the stand-alone art. It's certainly enough to make me want to check out more of their work.
If you're interested in checking it out for yourself Twenty-Dirt is available as a name-your-price download on Bandcamp. They'll be playing an album release show on December 21st at Cause.
