Author: Sam

Shane Reis: Reis & Shine

Sam

Shine on, you crazy rapper

The debut full-length from Shane Reis

Maybe you heard about Martin Manley. A long-time Kansas City sportswriter, he made the extraordinary decision to plan his own suicide 14 months in advance, all the while documenting his life on a web site that went live on the occasion of his death.

It’s interesting that he would at the same time wish to die and effectively live on forever in the annals of the Web, his every interest and familial detail articulated. He was at once documentarian and the guy who shuts off the lights at the end of the show.

There’s something similar going on in hip hop these days, as rappers increasingly create albums that document their interior monologue, hyper-personal introspections over R&B samples and bouncy snares. Further, there are often assurances that said rapper won’t forget his/her upbringing when the big-time hits, that the fire that forged the rapper in question is vital to the forward trajectory of the big hip-hop career and the music, itself.

In other words, you can’t know their music without knowing them.

Shane Reis goes so far as to ponder “what woulda happened if I had died this weekend” late in his debut full-length, Reis & Shine, a 17-track collection of indie-pop contemporary rap, with familiar nods to the soul and funk traditions. On “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” Kristina Kentigian, quickly becoming a studio pro’s pro and piling up credits on local albums (the hip-hop equivalent to a horn section with Ryan Zoidis and Dave Noyes), croons behind the first couple verses, then knocks out a beautifully executed sung verse of her own.

Like Manley and his web site, Reis declares his intentions bluntly, in a cadence like a more-deliberate Bread. “I got a lotta shit to say,” he informs us early on the title and opening track, keeping us up to speed on everything from his age (23) to his foibles: “Hear the people whispering, say I don’t belong.”

It’s not this reviewer’s place to psychoanalyze, but there’s certainly no shortage of fodder here for anyone who might like to take a swing. It’s like he’s lying on the couch laying himself bare.

Heck, in “Human Nature” we get the entire thought process behind whether he should be jealous of his significant other or not. Through one of the more progressive tracks, with back-step beats and an off-time piano cadence, he details the real reason why she decided to put her ring in her purse when out at the club: She didn’t want to lose it like he had done.

Maybe it will strike you as too intimate. Maybe you’ll relate.

The album as a whole is in some ways like De La Soul’s Plug 1 & Plug 2, which is more throwback-‘90s, but similarly delivers a consistent style of hip hop with every track, rather than mixing ballads and bangers or changing up vocal deliveries for effect. You might not have all the songs committed to memory, but every track is very listenable.

Nor do the guest spots by talented MCs like Spose, Lady Essence, Jay Caron and Syn the Shaman overpower their tracks. They mold their flows to Reis’ like a tasteful lead guitar solo.

Essence’s contribution to “Can Your Remember” is particularly sweet (as in: aw shucks), dueting with Reis on a chanted chorus that’s playful and catchy in rap harmony and then giving her side of her friendship with Reis, how the two of them related with their parents and the outside world when Eminem and others infected them while growing up with the need to MC.

Her mother read her rhymes and pronounced, “You need therapy.”

“At heart, we’re still the same kids,” Reis allows, and that’s the ultimate ingredient in making his music successful: It’s genuine. And there is a wonder about it that cuts through any bombast and boasts.

There’s a small part of Reis, maybe, that still doesn’t believe he’s made an album that you can pick up in Bull Moose or buy from iTunes just like “real” rappers. Which means he’s made it for all the right reasons.

Conifer: Self-titled

Sam

Timber ho!

Conifer stand tall on their debut release

The first song, “Troy Landmammal,” checks in at 23:35. When Conifer’s Zack Howard drops their brand-new self-titled disc off at the office [in the fall of 2004] he reminds me not to skip past it. It’s half the disc.

There is a point, about 10:30 in, where I’m tempted.

The song and album open with a surprisingly inviting series of beeps and boops, like tuning an FM dial where every station broadcasts just one continuous frequency. The band have somehow conveyed a remarkable warmth to these slippery noises with the way they’re being generated, an almost imperceptible backing track of single notes contributing. Conifer [that link is to a still-active Angelfire page with some cool stuff on it] have always seemed to struggle a bit in searching for the correct portion of digitalization and sampling they wanted to mix into their sound. On their recent 18-date national tour, they didn’t even bring the laptop. On the album, this introduction is the only time when you’ll especially notice their computerized roots.

It goes on for about four minutes, before guitar chords come in, every so slightly. Strum, strum, strum, strum — they enter like your standard shoegazer and build perceptibly till the drums arrive at around six minutes. The shoegazing finishes up, and the tune moves toward a more jammy drum sound and approach, meditative, with art-rock and metal elements from the guitars and bass.

It gets heavier and heavier, until you’re surprised by some primal screaming that dominates at the 10:30 mark — each scream in time with crashing cymbals and distorted guitar hits. It’s more than a bit disquieting, like an orc beating a large animal over the head repeatedly with a club, just to see what happens. It’s really difficult to listen to unless you’re in the right mood (not sure what that mood is, exactly). As I wrote before, I always consider fast-forwarding at this point (someday I’ll write a whole column on how CD technology and its skip-to-the-next-song method of listening to music has contributed more to the age of the single than most people claim the mp3 has).

But, of course, I don’t, and after two minutes or so, the song reverts into a repeating series of tripled chunks before quieting down and getting contemplative again, brooding rat-a-tat-tats in the background.

It’s quite melodic around the 15-minute mark, actually, a hand sliding up and down the fretboard picking at notes. Then it moves toward something more hard-charging and frenetic, a guitar soloing in distorted feedback fashion over an undercurrent of marching chords.

The listener is then made privy to what sounds like a totally different song by the 20-minute point, reminiscent of Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys are Back in Town” (that’s really the title, I checked) if that song didn’t suck. Well, that might be overstating Conifer’s catchiness here. But it hints at catchy. I could imagine they were thinking about doing something catchy.

Then “Troy” finishes out with a deliberative repetition that would be another band’s transition or bridge but here lasts for about two minutes.

No, there aren’t any lyrics. It strikes me that Becca DeWan might be able to do more with this in a “Classical” column than I can here. Conifer have developed an approach that borrows just as heavily from Rachmaninoff as Slint as Morbid Angel, and though others have made a similar combination, Conifer seem to indulge themselves in it, live in it, as much as I’ve ever heard. They take the methodical, ultra-tight approach of Cerberus Shoal and lay over it a dark and aggressive foreboding. They take the aggressive foreboding of Vertigod and stretch it out like taffy. They take the taffy of Mark Kleinhaut and Brad Terry and make it ice-cold and rigid.

In some ways, this makes them the most narrative of bands, as their music conjures scenarios.

I absolutely love the opening to “Widomaker,” a difficult, slow pacing just rippling with dirty energy, thanks mostly to the bass. I imagine some badass walking slowly across a room filled with utterly reprehensible types, not even noticing their existence. He’s got swagger dripping from the greasy ends of his hair.

But there’s this guitar that doesn’t really seem to want to play ball, an annoyance, or maybe a girl he can’t take his eyes off of. Then everything stops at 2:40 — their eyes lock — silence — then the initial pangs of conversation as a rattle of cymbal echoes fluttering eyelashes. But then he keeps walking, now a bit discordant.

The final song on the album, “Albuquerque Reprise,” calls to mind a disconcerting image of domestic violence. It starts with simple heavy chords standing alone, then is joined by a snarling and slurred guitar, like a drunken dad coming home to an abusive household that had been fearing his return. The song starts to thrash around a bit, with some pretty tortured and screamed vocals, believable in their desperation. It gives me the creeps.

Yes, with their NotCommon debut full-length, Conifer have created a moody and introspective effort that has more soul than Adamo, a similar effort that Conifer’s Nate Nadeau and Sean Hadley spent a year developing in 2001. They’ve taken that math-rock sensibility and infused it with hardcore’s passion.

Don’t skip past them.