Albarn, Flea & Co. Venture to the Boundaries of Pop Music

Some band names paint a grossly inaccurate description of the band’s musical style—Cute Is What We Aim For and Hoobastank immediately come to mind. Rocket Juice & the Moon, in contrast, provides a dead ringer for the band’s sound, which can best be described as a marriage of space rock and juicy rap overseen in the chapel of electronic funk. The band members—established legends Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz, bassist Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and drummer Tony Allen from Fela Kuti’s afrobeat band Africa ’70—each make use of their specific expertise to create a wholly new musical space. The eponymous debut—which features Erykah Badu as well as many African musicians who play in various genres—is an innovative and educational experience that takes the listener through a re-interpretation of rap, rock, funk, and afrobeat.

Listeners who expect the sharp rock melodies of Blur or the pounding anthems of the Red Hot Chili Peppers may be confused or disappointed. Afrobeat textures and percussive lines dominate the arrangement, and Albarn and Flea only seem to be providing tight accompaniment to the musical concept. In addition, Allen’s dense rhythmic patterns give the album a potentially jarring foreignness to mainstream listeners. However, Albarn’s and Flea’s rock origins are not entirely abandoned. Flea brings his trademark aggressive slapping style to form a steady rhythmic foundation for Albarn’s guitar melodies in songs like “There.” Moreover, electronic effects, like the heavily-distorted phone ringing and synthesized outbursts in “Extinguished,” add another stylistic dimension that makes the album much more than a mere afrobeat-heavy rock experiment.

While the band’s instrumentation alone—a drum kit, electronic synths, bass, electric guitar, horns, and vocals—is indicative of the musicians’ rock and funk backgrounds, the album is particularly refreshing due to its unorthodox rhythmic patterns. The album joins complex, stuttering rhythms with non-traditional melodies. “Chop Up,” for example, takes minimal primary and background vocals, 16th note syncopation à la afrobeat on a standard kit, and dancing melodic lines in the electric guitar to create a driving result entirely unexpected given its constituent parts. On “The Unfadable,” Allen lays down a simple shuffling beat that Albarn’s synths actively redefine by creating a conflicting rhythm of their own.

The vocals are as diverse as the album’s stylistic influences. The melodic lines on the album are not so interesting for their lyrics so much as their vocal techniques. These include melisma—when the voice changes tones on a single word—and syllabic percussion, which lends the songs much more sophistication than poetic delivery alone. Instrumentally-based songs like “There” use the latter technique in the back-up vocals to support its harmony and texture. However the voice is also used in a more familar manner: several songs, such as “Dam(n)” and “Poison,” feature rap that make use of lyricism in deliberate, imagery-filled poetry reminiscent of Common: “I painted the sky red, until the raindrops bled / Now Heaven whispers words I never said.” This intelligent use of the voice, as alternatively instrumental and lyrical, is but one factor that elevates Rocket Juice & the Moon’s stylistic experiment above categorization of simply a jazz or rock concept album.

Despite all of its wanderings and international influence, Rocket Juice & the Moon doesn’t sound overly foreign. Many Americans are more than familiar with the album’s different parts, including hip-hop, electronica, and funk, and Rocket Juice & the Moon provides a compositional learning experience in the blending of popular, though seldom crossed, styles. Two steps beyond Kid Cudi in creating a spacey, psychedelic rap/funk mix, Rocket Juice & the Moon uses heavily-distorted electronic pads and effects in conjunction with the more traditional instrumentation and does not simply depend on the novelty of space-age synths alone. The electronics are used not in a gimmicky sense, but rather to enhance and set apart already successful base material. There is often much rewarding about trying new things, especially when they prove not to be as foreign as first anticipated. Rocket Juice & the Moon serves as a perfect example.