Album Review: Edan – Echo Party (2009)

Album Review: Edan – Echo Party (2009)
Rating: 4 out of 5 Potholes

Buy Now! Edan – Echo Party

With his past albums, Edan has proved himself to be a foreword thinking hip-hop purist; a part-time preservationist with an eye on experimentation. On both 2002’s Primitive Plus and 2005’s Beauty and the Beat, emcee, DJ and producer Edan combined the sounds and samples of classic hip hop with other genres including funk and psychedelic rock. With his newest instrumental mixtape, Echo Party, Edan continues making eclectic music that pays tribute to hip hop’s past while introducing new sounds.

Echo Party is a singly thirty-minute track that plays out like a sustained crash between old school hip hop (donated by Traffic Entertainment Group’s extensive catalogue), funk, rock, disco, and the occasional futuristic sound-effect. Edan layers and blends elements from the differing genres consistently throughout the track. At no point in the mix could the listener claim the music belongs to a single genre. For example, a thick funk baseline will play for an unaccompanied instant until a scratched vocal “I got a new rap and it’s all about space” gets placed atop it and later punctuated with eclectic bleeps and blips easily associated with interstellar travel.  A strength of the mix is its cohesiveness. It would be easy for it to get tangled up in its competing sounds, but Edan skillfully balances each and builds a wholly unique and interesting work that avoids being bogged down by the weight of its contributions.

With a name like Echo Party no one should expect this to be music to nap to.  It keeps a fast pace for the full thirty minutes. Part of the album’s frenzy can be attributed to how frequently Edan switches sources and samples. A listener never has a chance to get to comfortable with a stretch of music before Edan introduces something to switch it up. Think schizophrenic Madlib or RJD2 with ADD.

As with any experimental work however, many listeners will have trouble adapting to this music. Some may have preferred it if Edan had produced a more conventional album that gave more attention to the contained classic hip-hop. Similarly, the frequent use of electronic sound effects will annoy some.  Surely electric kazoos, intergalactic glockenspiels, drums backed up by lasers and sirens are not for everyone. At points, the more abstract noises draw too much attention to themselves.

Even if put-off by the mixtape’s eccentricities, one must praise Edan for trying to take hip hop in a new direction, while still bringing along many of the elements that birthed it. And even though it is not a mixtape in the contemporary use of the word, it certainly raises expectations for Edan’s upcoming full-length. It will be interesting to hear where Edan finds room in the dizzying array of sounds to drop his similarly diverse rhymes. Echo Party should not be seen as a mere stop-over on the way to his third full-length however.  It should be enjoyed as a complex piece of experimentation that faithfully blends numerous types of music into a satisfying listening experience.