Album Review: Georgia Anne Muldrow – Umsindo (2009)

Album Review: Georgia Anne Muldrow – Umsindo (2009)
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Potholes

Between Dudley Perkins’ Expressions, Erykah Badu’s first installment of New Amerykah and this album, if it hasn’t already happened the synthesis between soul and hip-hop is pretty much complete. We stumbled through quite a few experiments with hip-hop and contemporary R&B in the late ’90s, but at the end of this century it’s the soul and funk hip-hop artists are after. Georgia Anne Muldrow is a name that I admit I’ve only become familiar with in the past couple of years, but to the Stones Throw faithful she’s been an exciting name for a few years now. I first noticed her name on Expressions, but I never thought to look for any kind of catalog at the time. Her name next stood out to me as a collaborator on Badu’s “Master Teacher”, and so at this point I thought, “this woman’s been involved in two of my most favorite, forward-thinking soul albums in recent memory…what’s she got next?” Well, apparently it’s a 24-track collection of sketched experiments and fully realized product that defies any real logical categorization. What, is this just a soul album? Or is it some long lost relic of the p-funk era? What Lauryn Hill would have been thinking about if she did as many drugs as D’Angelo during her fallout?

Running the gauntlet of Muldrow’s musical heritage, from African and Native American tribal chants to Stevie Wonder to Quasimoto, Umsindo is nothing if not adventurous. Perhaps Muldrow fans had some expectations for what this might sound like, maybe those expectations were even met. But for someone like me coming into this from the perspective of just three features (her recent Mos Def appearance being the third) and high hopes, I’m fully satisfied. Even better are all the touchstone sounds of Badu’s New Amerykah Part One, a record whose sequel is long overdue. In its place comes this, the perfect substitute. Like that album, this delicately tiptoes the line thematically between personal, political and spiritual while doing a similar dance around being too experimental for its own good and just new enough.

Unlike the Badu record, however, Muldrow goes the Madlib route of excess and comes out the other end with a record that, while no less impressive, has a slightly blunted impact (pun intended). Umsindo is sprawled out before the listener on the coffee table, and its pieces are never fully put together into a complete puzzle. Thanks to the genrephrenic nature of the music, the album must have been tough to sequence with so many tracks and I just get the feeling if it were trimmed to even 16 or 17 tracks Umsindo would be that much more exciting to listen to. As it stands, it’s still a damn dope album, and after hearing Dudley Perkins’ latest album the feat is made all the greater realizing she was on fire throughout these entire sessions. Not once on either album does Muldrow sound fatigued or recycled. Like Madlib, she’s game for just about anything (though she’s most often found huddling around the funk) and if she’s chosen Tuesday, July 28, 2009 as her official day of reckoning I’m here to say I’m ready for the Georgia Anne Muldrow-era. I’m very ready.