NOM DE GUERRE? By any name, Dabrye’s got the flow.
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Dabrye is one of a handful of aliases used by Michigan-based knob twiddler Tadd Mullinix (a name so cool, you could be think it too must be a nom de guerre). On the first Dabrye album, 2001’s One/Three, Mullinix made MC-less hip-hop that, like a glitched-up version of DJ Shadow’s stuff, compensated for a lack of rapping with loads of lovely instrumental detail. MCs populate more than half the cuts on Two/Three, the second installment in what Mullinix calls “a trilogy of the Dabrye sound,” but the vocal presence (from undie-rap stars like Vast Aire of Cannibal Ox and the late Jay Dee) doesn’t prompt any relaxing of sonic standards — if this stuff is worth hearing, it’s for Dabrye’s mixing-board magic, not the guests’ solid, workmanlike rhymes. Dabrye’s best trick here is finding the funk in claustrophobia. In “Special,” a jazzy cymbal tap injects air into a squiggly synth riff; in “Bloop,” which follows, that riff descends underwater and smoothes out into moist neo-soul.
DABRYE + PERCEE P | July 10 | Great Scott, 1222 Comm Ave, Allston | 617.566.9014
On the Web
Dabrye: //www.darbye.com/
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