Arts the Beatdoctor
Transitions
The first I heard of Arts the Beatdoctor was when my friend played me ‘The Anthem’ (on his mobile phone, the first time I’ve ever been introduced to an artist this way). It’s a great track, complete with mock English (Gilles Peterson aping?) intro, driven by a piano loop and a high voltage vocal from Pete Philly – ‘just give me a beat and I’ll rhyme something proper’.
So when I got my hands on Transitions, I expected it to be more of the same - a straight up party hip hop album, but that’s just one of the flavours to be found on the LP. The key to the album lies in the title, as ‘The Anthem’ aside, each track blends seamlessly into the next, feeling more like an extended jam session with MCs occasionally dropping in and out to add their parts. It’s Arts’ use of the vocalists which is particularly interesting – he sees the voice merely as another instrument, no more worthy of attention than any other.
In a genre where the focus is firmly on the MC and when you’re using ones of the quality of Pete Philly and The Proov, this means you better have need to have some real quality to back it up. And Arts does. In spades. Transitions is one of the best produced albums I’ve heard in a while, and one of the most emotionally affecting. Once you sit down to listen to this album, it’s impossible to get up until it’s finished, and when it is, you feel slightly empty. It’s the perfect soundtrack for this ‘summer’ as we all go down with Seasonal Affectional Disorder and struggle to cope with the chronic lack of sun. Without trying to push this fragile link too far, Transitions even mirrors the way this summer has progressed– starting off bouncing along and happy with ‘The Anthem’, before traveling along a more melancholy route.
So what does it actually sound like? Well, it’d be easy to make the usual comparisons to instrumental hip hop titans Aim, DJ Shadow and RJD2, but at no point during the course of the album could you directly compare Arts to one of them. He draws on a jazzier base than all of these, leading to the freeform style of the LP, and his use of bass on Split Personality even evokes the Asian underground stylings of Badmarsh and Shri. If you match the mood and scale of RZA’s production to the lusher, jazz sound of Break Reform or Pete Philly and Perquisite and you might be somewhere near. Perhaps the best description of Arts’ sound is given in the intro to ‘The Anthem’: “a hot new sensation for you, straight from the Netherlands, a funky, soul, groovy sort of thing”.
Even this doesn’t do justice to the richness and depth to be found in this album, which deserves a much wider audience than its so far limited release in Benelux and Japan.