When the world outside is weird, let’s hear it for an album that processes it with absurdist humour and George Clinton-shaped surrealism. Drunk is the third release by LA jazz dude Steve Bruner, AKA Thundercat, and has finally taken him from being a kooky bass-playing Robin to super-producer Flying Lotus’s Batman all the way to headline solo artist and one of this year’s breakthrough names. It says a lot of his credentials that he convinced soft-rock heavyweights Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins to appear on an album that features fart noises and song dedicated to a pet puss called Turbo Tron Over 9000 Baby Jesus Sally. Or that Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell Williams, Kamasi Washington and Wiz Khalifa guest star. But this 23-track odyssey has also punctured mainstream consciousness because it’s deliriously funky.
It turns out that it helps to have slap bass when tackling the confusion of existence. Drunk busts open the Alice in Wonderland door to Bruner’s unsettled psyche and attempts to furrow a trail through consciousness and conscience. The idea, he says, was to express “the dizziness of what we’re dealing with now” – inspired in part by his Grammy-winning work on Lamar’s protest album To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015 – and whether you’re better off coping with it baked or awake. And so the musical mind-soup of spacey soul, stoner R&B, electro-synth and jazz improv flickers with reflections on police brutality (Jameel’s Space Ride), masculinity and gang culture (Walk on By), mortality (Lava Lamp) and, on The Turn Down, America’s race versus class war. Yet at the same time, Bruner emerges as an endearing dreamer who finds respite in comic books and computer games. Perhaps it’s to be expected of an artist who collected the aforementioned Grammy while wearing a lightsaber, but, when a lover is being indecisive about coming over on anti-booty call song Friend Zone, he’d “rather play Mortal Kombat anyway” and in Tokyo, he fizzes about how he’s “gonna blow all my cash on anime”.
Drunk isn’t just a triumph of eccentricity, though; it’s an achievement in sound, and a psychedelic homage to the Funkadelic, Herbie Hancock and Doobie Brothers’ 1970s. Its standout tracks, such as Show You the Way, I Am Crazy, Inferno and Them Changes, are bathed in soft rock’s incandescent glow, adding sublimely lit melody to Bruner and co-producer Lotus’s cosmic tumble of ideas and lip-curling basslines. This contrast, where feathery falsetto meets squelchy bottom end, gives Drunk its delicious push and pull, between having your head in the clouds and being tugged down to reality. Bruner’s world is brave and new, and it doesn’t claim to have any answers. It’s surely the safest place to be in 2017.
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