| Entrinzic's sound is a funky, bluesy,
reggae-rich, hip hop-inflected, groove-heavy amalgam of the various branches of 20th
century black music that guitarist Matt Baron has been studying over the past several
years. Baron's habit of hanging out and playing in Chicago blues clubs culminated in a
two-year stint touring with reggae band Gypsi Fari, which in its quarter century of
traveling the world recorded more than once with Bob Marley and the Wailers.
The experience seems to have left Baron with a
spacious warehouse of musical ideas. After leaving Gypsi Fari he began writing the songs
that make up Entrinzic's new debut CD, Dig Deep, which is an impressively taut
showcase of complex rhythms, three-part vocals and solid sax and trombone solos, topped
off by the very welcome, nimble scratching of DJ Fast Fingaz. The songs generally
alternate between a backbone of either reggae or funk in the tradition of James Brown,
Parliament or the Meters. Those, of course, are genres very well-tread by cover and
revival bands, so it's never easy for the disciples of those disciplines to earn the
elusive title "original." Even the relatively novel touch of adding a DJ to a
funk/blues outfit has been done before by the likes of the Brand New Heavies. But Dig
Deep mixes up its sounds with sufficient diversity and polish to deserve ears and
fans. The funky rhythms are punchily punctuated by Spanish rap ("Drink the
Wine"), jazzy scat ("Hazel Eyes"), snappily integrated samples of James
Brown ("Three Fingaz"), and a range of other tricks. Baron also counts among his
influences Sublime, the Police, Marley, Jimi Hendrix, The Samples, Freddy King, and
Santana; each of whom are audible to widely varying degrees in Dig Deep.
Baron is an engaging enough singer, if you can
get past the nagging recognition that his act is almost pure affectation. He imitates the
raspy vocal style of Tom Waits but doesn't quite have Wait's natural husk, and he imitates
the accented, stilted English of Bob Marley even though Baron is a white man whose first
language is English. Oddly, one of the moments in his performance that seems least
affected comes (for a few seconds on "Moment of Bliss") when he manages a
perfect impression of the distinctively idiosyncratic neo-yodeling of Rusted Root lead
singer Michael Glabicki. It may not be an intentional influence, but in any case Baron
does his best work when he's attempting such vocal acrobatics, rather than trying to take
on someone else's accent or vocal range. Still, the music is too well arranged and too
well executed to leave listeners brooding over such quirks in the vocals. If they're half
as successful in person as they are on CD, Entrinzic sounds like excellent party material.
More
ChicagoGigs.com Reviews
Chicago
Music Discussion Board
|
