#def presse

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Pan Amsterdam & Damu the Fudgemunk - EAT (Def Pressé, Genre: Jazz Rap, Abstract Hip Hop, Artwork: Leron Thomas Bandcamp

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Raw Poetic — Away Back In (Def Pressé)

Photo by Nick Moreland

Away Back In by Raw Poetic. Feat. Damu the Fudgemunk

As summer slouches towards fall,  Jason Moore AKA Raw Poetic and his collaborators guitarist Pat Fritz and producer Damu the Fudgemunk issue a late addition to the seasonal groove. Away Back In rides in on Damu’s loose beats, Fritz’s jazz and soul inflected guitar and Moore’s combination of political rap and mindful crooning. Not that this is all sunshine and light. The sparkle of the music is balanced by lyrical spikiness and the awareness of existential threats both social and ecological. Moore finds antidotes to those threats through identity and activism, the music a defiant and radical expression of joy and being, the words mixing poetic reverie, raw experiential narrative and incisive commentary.

Damu’s drum patterns and programming settle into a loose swing that sit in a pocket behind the vocals but also motor the songs along whilst the  bass lines are as much felt as heard. The key however is Fritz’s guitar. His psychedelic pyrotechnics on “Bird’s Eye” are an effective outlier, but for the most he lays down chordal vamps and jazzy hooks that dodge and weave adding emphasis here, a languid cool here. As Moore exhorts us to take time to acknowledge the small, good things in life on opener “Ease Side”, Fritz’s guitar tugs at your sleeve, drawing attention to what’s in front of your eyes. On “Sometime After Midnight” Moore connects micro-aggressions to systematic racism and dissects the ways in which privilege twists language to justify the status quo whilst for the oppressed it’s a case of “I think I heard it all/I heard the murder call/I heard the word racism has got to still evolve/I heard the humans says they never saw a race at all/They shot a nigger in the back for fucking taking off ” The guitar is harsher, driven and in the end circles in on itself, a mobius strip of despair. There’s also hope and joy, “A Way Back In” celebrates the trio’s friendship and creative partnership and the closing track “Human Kindness (Acoustic Mix)” combines folk guitar and hip hop beats in a paean to simple acts of altruism. It’s an uplifting end to album which finds Raw Poetic proving once again to be powerful commentators on the human condition and musicians of the highest order.

Andrew Forell