:: Track Listing

1. TM Radio Intro
2. The Wiggle
3. On the Moon
4. It's Alright - Jahpan
5. That Good Feeling - Procussions
6. Night Lights (DJ Real Remix)
7. Let's Go - Jaysonic
8. Duh Huh - Rashaan Ahmad of Crown City Rockers
9. Freak Out - 9:15 feat. Jaysonic
10. Chains Intro - Jesse Calico
11. Make Some Noise - Edo G and Masta Ace
12. The Hustle Shuffle - Jahpan
13. Dream Come True - Shawn Jackson
14. To The Top - Fedd Hill
15. Caught on Tape
16. Dumbin' Out
17. Down and Dirty About My Scratch - Celph Titled
18. Stoe O'Clock Rock
19. Flume - Stoerok
20. Gassed - 9:15


:: Record Review

Time Machine

TM Radio
(Glow in the Dark; 2005)

Rating: 75%


While not exactly sounding just like the old school, Time Machine (emcees Comel and Jaysonic and DJ Mekalek) do function on an old school principle: find the right sample and the right drum break and make something dope by looping the sublime. The reviewer's left a bit adrift in an attempt to explain the quality of the music because the goodness doesn't rest in originality or compositional genius. This is music that's good for its warmth, its reverie, its proud flaws and rough edges, its intangibles. One thing's certain: Mekalek's got a Midas touch on his vinyl, and Comel and Jaysonic know how to rhyme over his bullion.

The true album exemplar would be last year's Slow Your Roll, in which the trio didn't stress it, they just delivered the right stuff in spades. While it's not as even-keel an affair, the TM Radio mixtape more directly illustrates the golden age, early-90's cogs that make the Time Machine run. The group throws together a fat assortment of tracks from themselves and their compatriots and connect it with a radio show theme, probably on some thought of simulating a broadcast deep from the heart of the Bronx in 1993. These guys roll on the West Coast, though, and that's felt in the music's sunny vibe and the nasally flows.

Intellectually, thematically, even sequentially, TM Radio doesn't do much holistically beyond that radio show concept, which indicates that the intention of this mix is to evoke a mood, place and time, a setting that'll make the hip-hop fans reminisce. With the album functioning as such, the too down-tempo and lengthy Stoerok instrumental "Flume" feels ever so slightly anachronistic, but the rest of these tracks fit, and even though most of this isn't the A-game material of the parties involved, a few of these songs stand individually as some of the best hip-hop cuts of 2005. A duo of them occurs in the album's second half.

On "To the Top," Rhode Island's Fedd Hill bring tougher flows and more guttery voices to a premium Mekalek beat with the standard ingredients: simple break, skipping-record keys, 80's vocal sample. Mek shifts his stance and drops the drums out at the end of the second verse and for even longer on the third, giving Jahpan a spotlight space to make the moment with "But this is Jahp forever 'til the day I'm in dirt / I put my life on the line, and all the pain that it's worth / And all the pain that it's hurt / It kept my soul in check / Took a look in the mirror / I got my own respect." Follow this with highest highlight "Caught on Tape" (previously released on the Grime Machine 12" from February), and the effect is dizzying.

"Caught on Tape" flaunts a sweet, sweet beat from Mekalek, too good for a written description outside of something vague like "it presses all the right buttons," and it sees Jaysonic and Comel dropping verses about scenarios in which certain people's foibles are caught on tape. The emcees join forces in the third act and expand their scope to a society in which everything is made known, few able to escape what's captured in videographic detail by a world full of cameras: "Winona Ryder wanna shop, but she don't wanna pay / Rodney King wanna get along, not in L.A. / He got beat, and now we talkin' bout it over a beat / cuz the camera's always rollin' when you out on the street."

Nothing else on the mixtape's quite as great (although it's tough to judge how the fine DJ Real remix of "Night Lights" measures up with the tall shadow of the original hanging over it), but there's not an artist represented, from Celph Titled to Masta Ace, who fails the tone and standards of the mix. Also, the beats are solid all the way through, varying from a dusty banger like "Make Some Noise" to the dynamic, Duplexx-flavored "Stoe O'Clock Rock" to the classic rap drum, bass, and sleighbell-shout groove of "Dumbin' Out." Time Machine create a scene that's difficult to leave, especially for the heads weary of the Dipset mixtapes that now stuff the hip-hop culture to its gills with shitty drum programming, retarded synths and samples that lack the intangible good.

Chet Betz :: 9 August 2005 |