Gil Scott-Heron's 2010 album, I'm New Here, was his first of original material in 16 years and best in three decades. But though it was a joyful return to the living for the once-homeless recovering addict and pivotal figure of pre-South Bronx talking blues, the album is defined by pallor. It's grim stuff, built around Scott-Heron's ashes-to-ashes baritone and XL founder Richard Russell's skeletal production, caked in grime and rust. It's essentially a podium for Scott-Heron's remarkable voice, ever-wheezing and cracking, that both supports and condemns his life choices with its grippingly dark magnitude.
Jamie Smith, percussionist and producer of the xx, has become a minor celebrity of the post-dubstep Brixton scene, earning a reputation as a DJ with his MPC mastery and as an ace remixer, crafting memorable, expansive edits of songs by Adele and Glasser in recent months. Smith, like many liners-scanning millennial sound nerds, is a massive Scott-Heron fan, and at Russell's suggestion has taken a stab at recontextualizing I'm New Here in service of changing sounds-- you can practically hear him cycling through subgenres track-to-track.
It's too dangerous to question either the necessity or the motivation behind such a project-- 22-year-old wunderkind cinches cred with resurgent iconoclast, perhaps?-- but it will come up. Do your best to ignore the impulse, because the residue of death that lingers on I'm New Here is wiped clean from We're New Here. It's replaced with brightness, an energy, and a historical milieu. Smith samples older Scott-Heron songs and works them into these newer songs. He takes a rare moment of singing, recorded for but not included on the initial album, and turns it into the Kieran Hebden-indebted "My Cloud", a gorgeous and redolent centerpiece. He turns a broken man into a recombinant diva.
Smith recently cited the likes of Rjd2 as both a pillar of influence, and the music of his youth-- and you can hear turn-of-the-century collagists like Rj, DJ Shadow, and El-P all over his constructions. Smith also samples and chops unlikely vocal sources, notably a snatch from Justine "Baby" Washington's lone hit, 1963's "That's How Heartaches Are Made", for the intro to "The Crutch", before it erupts into a drum'n'bass burst. Here, Smith's finicky, hard-charging production trumps Scott-Heron's voice, overpowering it with ideas, if not focus. But there's a go-for-it quality to Smith's production that suggests fearlessness over reverence. On the opener, "I'm New Here", he lifts a quickened dash of Gloria Gaynor's "Casanova Brown", giving the voice some shape and depth, and slyly nodding to a polar contemporary of Scott-Heron's. This feels like quite a distance from disco, and yet Smith shortens the gap between Scott-Heron's proud missives and exuberant dance music.
Each experiment is a gamble; some of these spoken-word recitations were meant to be without a speed or brightened exterior-- a reconsideration of I'm New Here standout "Me and the Devil" is noticeably absent here. And this isn't a simple "Is it better?" proposition. The sonorous, Bernard Hermann-esque "NY Is Killing Me" is such a far cry from the hand-clapping original that there's hardly any comparison at all. Only rarely does something like "I'll Take Care of U" happen. That song, the closer, is the purest distillation of Smith's taste for spacious melodrama and cinematic sweep-- it'd have fit nicely on xx. These two men only discussed the music here, briefly, in handwritten letters. That much shows, though putting them in the same room is the next logical step both for Smith, who claims he has no interest in a solo album, and Scott-Heron, who is now back in the consciousness and ready to be pushed hard. Here's to reunions.
