Track Reviews // Oscar Jerome - Gravitate
Single (Caroline International, May 28th 2019)
Broken beat was an afrofuturist, electronic home brew
fermented at Co-Op in West London.
This was the club night where pioneer MCs would harness late 90s London’s jungle,
DnB and techno energies to explore musicality and the quasi-religious
introspection and reflection found on the wrong side of 4am in sweaty, loud
rooms.
Exploration and abandonment in music was the credo embodied in
IG Culture, Bugz in the Attic and
others and it’s honoured in the form of Oscar
Jerome on his latest cut Gravitate. Down
South London Jerome has been honing
multiple crafts. A musician, performer, vocalist and writer building a body of
work that’s as formidable on record as at his live show, slotting into a
rampant, young London jazz scene and racking up mad co-features.
This, his latest single, is a celebration of all things jam
and features members of Ezra Collective and
Kokoroko exchanging chops until there’s
nothing left but a vocal choir. The live video spins like the walls of an after
party kitchen as machine gun breakbeat drumming coaxes wailing, descending
licks out of Jerome’s classically
trained guitar fingers like a dancing marionette. The production is pure
beauty, paying homage to the roots of the broken beat movement in laser pens
and MPCs – it’s a restless, shifting city street of noise and eerie hush;
patient for a second and then busting the doors down.
The vocals are audibly gaining confidence from record to
record and the lyrics swoop from the bodily to the cosmic with liquid alacrity.
Conventionally I’d now be crying out for an LP, but with shows, singles and EPs
of this quality, I’m good for whatever Oscar
Jerome tries next. Here and all over; taking conservatoire-level ability
out into stellar neo-soul via the once-glorious club scene is a locomotive
gathering speed in the City of the underground.
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