Another winning effort from LA's under-rated Cold Busted stable, and now available on ultra-limited vinyl
Cold Busted are a label who don't get
half as much attention as they deserve. Based in downtown Los
Angeles, they turn out dusty trip-hop, lo-fi hip-hop, wonky jazz and
other leftfield/downtempo delights at a prodigious rate, yet the
quality meter dips only very rarely. If you're a fan of labels like
Stone's Throw or Freestyle, Cold Busted definitely need to be on your
radar.
The quality meter certainly shows no sign of
dipping on this latest offering from Boogie Belgique. Known to the
taxman as Oswald Cromheecke, this purveyor of "abstract hip-hop and
electroswing" (as he describes it) made his debut with Blueberry Hill
on Dusted Wax Kingdom in 2012. Since then, he's released three more
albums via Cold Busted - Nightwalker Vol 1, Nightwalker Vol 2 and
Time For A Boogie - and now the label is reissuing his first opus and
making it available on vinyl for the first time.
Where much 'electroswing' is
essentially house with some jazz samples thrown at it, what you'll
hear on Blueberry Hill is more akin to actual swing/jazz, but with the
beats and basslines of contemporary dance music slipped carefully
underneath. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one: it
suggests a genuine love of (and reverence for) the music of
yesteryear, and it means you can rest assured that Blueberry Hill
never drifts into the realms of the cheesy and obvious. It also means, of course, that if jazz
and swing are a turn-off for you - as they are for some - then this
isn't going to be the album for you. But if you're a fan of jazzual
stylings, you'll be happy to hear that this sits much closer on the
spectrum to Jazzanova than to Gramaphonedzie.
Best of all - you can download the albumfor
free via Boogie Belgique's Bandcamp
page, though we'd heartily recommend forking out $10 for the
remastered vinyl version. You'll have to be quick, mind – the
latter is strictly limited to 100 copies.
Review Score: 8
Tags: Boogie Belgique, Cold Busted, jazz, electroswing