Album Review: Muhsinah – The Oscillations: Triangle (2009)
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Potholes

Muhsinah makes drugs… drugs created from the passion of the creative mind. Her sound is the type of music that reprograms and transports listeners to her rhythmic dimensions; so whether in a state of sobriety or intoxication this music engages. Oscillations: Triangle, is the sort of contemporary singing record that merges electronica, jazz and hip hop into a style that is recognizable, but indefinable. It posits Muhsinah within the emerging, “beat generation” of global beat makers cross-pollinating sounds from various genres of music to form new musical identities. Using acoustic piano melodies as weak backbones for her compositions, Muhsinah stacks and layers drums, bass lines, synths, and her vocals among other elements to create atmospheres of joy, desire, and eros.

From the jump off Muhsinah gets the party started with “Before”, which drills its fuzzy thump into your body. On another track the escalating piano chords of “Always” hits hard with its funky drums and request for folks just to smile, and with the provided beat it is hard not to. Center stage is quickly over taken by the dreary ominous majesty provided by the almost infallible Flying Lotus on “Lose My Fuse”: crackling drums, breathing used as maracas, a drone-like bass, and space craft synths secrete with Muhsinah’s vocals to manifest one of the year’s best records. Fellow beat king Oddissee brings things back to earth with the true-skool bounce of “That Day”: a mellow east coast sample montage that allows Muhsinah to loving muse about precious moments. Later on the album, the soul-side of Terminator is found on “From Here”: an almost uncanny robot rhythm that stutters and fluctuates with Muhsinah’s most confident and stylish vocal performance of the album. Near the end of the album, one can also zone out to “Neater”, a moody groove that drags one into the darker edges of romance.

Though, Oscillations is not without fault. “Stay Here”, a beat from Exile’s conceptually brilliant Radio, sounds a bit stale on here, while the more free form arrangements of “Siz” may tune people out from the more “normative” moments. “Siz” is also followed by awkwardly placed “After”. A short solo piano and vocal performance that would have seemed more at home near the middle of the album. Yet, those criticisms cannot out shine the alter-dimensional beauty of Muhsinah’s brightest moments. Elegant and soaring pieces of music breathe, construct, decompose, shift and morph into what contemporary R&B and Soul music should aim to be without being cheap imitators.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under Album Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.