Sometimes things happen around me and I miss them completely. Then I get blindsided by the existence of said thing. This happened last fall when I was writing for the Rifflandia festival guide and was assigned to write a bio for Kandle. I went in not knowing anything about her and was astonished at her immense musical talents when I put on her first independent release Set The Fire. (What. An. Album.) How I had completely missed nearly a decade of this incredible musician who was from my hometown?! How the fuck did I manage this? And she's the daughter of west coast music legend, 54·40 frontman Neil Osbourne? Truly this was a tremendous blunder by me. Luckily she was easy to track down so I could find out more.
Though she grew up in and around it, music wasn't always the end goal. “My whole life I think I was doomed and destined to be an artist,” Kandle says with a laugh. “I am kind of into everything. I went to school for photography in Victoria. I do a lot of drawing and painting. I started writing poems and then I started playing guitar. I kind of started doing music by accident.” It's a good thing for music lovers that accident occurred because Kandle has been consistently untouchable - delicately balancing modern sounds with big nods to crooners of the past – without ever sounding like a pale imitation of that past. “I've definitely always been a sucker for all of the classic crooners. I learned to sing by copying Billie Holiday when I was teenager. Growing up in the 90s with a rock dad I was really into alternative stuff, every “head” band – Radiohead, Portishead.” Even though you can hear the influences throughout her music, Kandle is most definitely not doing an homage – her music is entirely her own and all of our ears are better for it. I'm so glad I got the opportunity to not only write about this amazing artist for one of my city's biggest festivals, but also that she was so easy to track down and so effervescent when I did! Enjoy this wonderful instalment of 5 Questions with Rags featuring the powerful KANDLE.
1. What is the first album you remember buying with your own money?
It was Our Lady Peace, Clumsy. I was a diehard fan when I was like 6. I may have peed myself when I met them. <laughs> My dad never full got my obsession with them. I think they were opening for him around the time I got obsessed and he was just like, “ooookay.” I was just screaming “Superman's Dead” in my little overalls. It gets me every time.
2. What's the best memory you have of a teacher or mentor growing up?
This is going to be a shoutout to my Oak Bay art teacher. Mr McGulky. (Note: I cannot confirm the spelling on this. Please forgive me if it's wrong!) It was my, I dunno, sixth high school at that point? I'd kind of given up on making friends and fitting in after that many. For the first little while there, even now we're still friends, but he was my only friend there for awhile. I had pretty crippling anxiety about getting bullied, not fitting in, not doing well in school. Everyone knew I was a bad seed. He would lie for me. He would write notes for me to get out of science class. If I was freaking out about something, he would have my back. He would always roll his eyes and complain about it but he looked after me and I always really appreciated him. He's always proud of me.
The Osmanity Session - A Conversation with Balkan Bump
In late 2020 producer Will Magid, known to the music world as Balkan Bump, quietly released Osmanity, his full-length debut under the moniker. It's a wildly fun and ambitious record that really sounds like nothing else out in the musical ether. It's an album with deep grooves and big musical ideas, clearly crafted by someone with a deep well of skill to draw from and, perhaps more important, a more than palpable LOVE for music. “The title track 'Osmanity', me and my buddy Greg who co-wrote it, did the basic framework of it about 4 years ago. The CloZee track came out about a year and a half ago. Basically, I just started working on music and at some point realized, 'Hey wait, these songs fit together. I could put out an EP but I have more than four or five songs,'” says Balkan Bump describing the genesis of Osmanity to me over the phone from his home in Oakland. “Deciding to make an album at that point guided the rest of the writing and production process. It gave me a framework, 'Okay, I'm going to make this record. It's going to largely incorporate sounds from the Ottoman Empire, but of course with hip-hop and electronic and some jazz.' That decision gave me the context to get the album to another level as far as the cohesiveness of it. That's where the interludes come in and a few of the songs I wrote really late in the process to seal the package of the record together.”
While the album is a clear, cohesive statement with one person at the helm, Osmanity is at its core a deeply collaborative record, and for good reason. “I'm a pretty social person and I grew up playing in bands. So the idea of being a lone-wolf producer is not really my personality. For the most part I really thrive in environments of collaboration – out in the world at a festival, on tour or even just on the computer, on Soundcloud. In the case of Poldoore, we met on Soundcloud like 10 years ago and I think I've played trump on nearly half of his songs or something and he's done several remixes for me. CloZee, we toured together and vibed a lot together. We were talking about hip-hop [earlier], and I love the idea of group like the Wu-Tang Clan,” the excitement in Bump’s voice is more than palpable. “Okay, you have this group but you have all these individuals who have their own careers and collabroations. I look at the music world that way. All these artists are really connected, there are so many threads. The classic example of the scene I'm in is Big GriZmatik. Gramatik and GriZ and Big Gigantic are obviously separate artists, but can easily be one artist with different muscles being shown when different players step out front. I love that idea. It's not that I seek collaboration out or that it falls in my lap, it's more of just a natural continuum of the folklore nature of music.”
5 Questions with Rags #79 - Balkan Bump
Things haven't been great in my brain for awhile and, like a lot of people, I've just been doing what I can to get by for awhile now. Part of that meant that writing about music fell by the wayside. I still like listening to it, but gathering the strength to write about it was just something that I haven't been able to do. But things are slowly moving again and I can feel a bit of rhythm in the air. My friends are going to festivals and dancing and reporting back. And one of the names that keeps coming back in reports is BALKAN BUMP. All these glowing reviews reminded that about a year and a half ago, I tracked him down for one of the best interviews I'd had in a long while. Two music-lovers, talking about music. And as he returns to Vancouver Island this Saturday (August 20 at the fantastic Cumberland Wild in Cumberland) it seems like the perfect time to finally present this interview. This interview is from FEBUARY 2021. I cannot believe it has taken this long for me to share this.
At the beginning of last year, one of the last albums I was genuinely obsessed with was Osmanity by California-based musician and producer Will Magid, better known to me – and many other dancefloor astronauts up and down the west coast – as Balkan Bump. Osmanity, is an immaculately constructed album that works so well on headphones, but also keeps reminding you of sweaty, ass-shaking nights on a dancefloor. It is an album full of fresh ideas, sounds and, most importantly these days, energy. Osmanity is tremendously inventive and deeply fun – the creation of a musician whose love of the craft is evident from the opening notes right through to closing. Osmanity became a daily listen for me. I needed to know more. I needed to talk to the creator of this most excellent album. And lucky for me, the man himself was more than willing to jump on the phone and talk some shit with me. Not only did we cover Osmanity in more detail than I could have imagined, he was also game for a one of the finest rounds of 5 Questions with Rags so far. It's conversations like this that have me keeping music close, still staying at least a little bit in love with it. This shit right here is why I'm back.
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Def3 + Late Night Radio - Weddings & Funerals (Album Review)
Building on the phenomenal sounds and successes of Def3’s Small World, Weddings & Funerals finds the MC re-teaming with producer/DJ/general magicmusicman Late Night Radio for another feast where electronic music and hip-hop combine and reach something different, new and important. The pairing is a phenomenal match – evident that both artists understand each other and as such, compliment each other perfectly. On Weddings & Funerals, the raps and beats stand side by side in triumph, resulting in one of the years most warm, immediate and welcoming records.
Even more than Small World, Weddings & Funerals is deeply warm and highly personal; an album that feels like it needed to be made. On “Better” the homie raps “Funny thing about it when I write these jams, is in the end I’ma probably need it more than my fans,” and there’s where the impact of Weddings & Funerals lies. The specificity of the lyrical focus makes it all feel very universal and relatable.
“Just Wait” comes out of the gate hard with deep, smooth bass and some Dragonball Z. I’m constantly shocked the things I know about Dragonball Z because of rap music despite having never watched any of it. It's a great opener that sets up the rest of the album perfectly; some of the best straight-up rap-boasting I’ve heard in some time.
Late Night Radio is bringing some serious grooves here, as he is want to do. The groove on “Lift Off” is seriously infectious and should be a late-night wind-down party jam when everyone on the dancefloor is spent and just needs a warm hug. “Real Love” is a big, huge love song with an incredible swelling sax line – when the instrumentation drops and we’re left with just Def3 and the rhythm, it’s something special. “Drowning” is an arresting, contemplative, beautiful piece of hip-hop that finds Def3 bouncing over wonderfully lilting keys and horns. The production is so thought out, clear – every instrument, every beat is slotted in perfectly and given the proper space to breathe.
A lot of the album touches on fighting through darkness, both personal and societal, and while I do find that tiresome as a recurring theme quite often, the way the raps are built and sit on the beats here, the message never feels cumbersome or overwrought. Def3 radiates too much joy from the mic to for me to ever find the slightest bit bothersome. This is lyrical dexterity and relentless warmth – a deadly combo. Nothing on the album is more emblematic of this balance than “Push.” It’s a big, driving tune suiting of its title and a song that I would expect to be on a variety of playlists.
When we near the end of the record, LNR and Def3 drop “Got Away,” an achingly gorgeous and uplifting ode to the people that have been lost on the journey. The big, swelling organ combined with LNR’s little guitar flourishes and Def3’s flow is a deadly combination. And if that’s not enough, we finish it not by looking at weddings or funerals, but rather at birth, as Def3 closes up with the exquisitely lovely letter to his daughter, “Rani.”
The word “warm” has appeared a couple of times here I know, but in a cultural landscape that seems to be being slowly drained of warmth from every angle – hip-hop being a very big victim of this draining – Weddings & Funerals is like a blanket straight from the dryer on a cold evening. Highly recommended for anyone who needs some peace, some encouragement and/or some kindness – with big, cozy, groovy beats to match – in their hip-hop diet.
You can stream Weddings & Funerals on your favourite streaming platform, or better yet - go support good music and pick it up from Bandcamp.
The Dough Boys - The Dough Boys (Album review)
The Dough Boys - The Dough Boys (Album Review)
The Dough Boys self-titled debut is a perfect slice of chilled-out jazz-rap swagger; a confident, hazy-blazed way to introduce themselves to the world. In the opening track “Eulogy” BRAINiac declares “I don’t need the beat, I’ll kill this a capella” and with his previously laid evidence I have no doubt this is true, but I'm glad he doesn't go a capella because the melding of the MC with The Dough Boys has created something unique, dripping with ideas and energy. The Dough Boys have some serious musical chops and obvious chemistry that raise their debut to something unique in the quickly saturated jazz-rap world. At a time when a lot of albums are seemingly created for a streaming world, with too many tracks – songs stretched to 4 minutes to maximize profits, etc, The Dough Boys have a created a sharp, focussed, well-thought out piece of art to start their journey with. The album leaves you wanting more, not thinking about where the fat could have been trimmed.
“Dogs Gotta Eat,” the albums first single and a rework of the track that appeared on BRAINiac's incredible Lunch Meat (2019), is an obvious highlight. It brings some heaviness that the original didn't have while doing the very important work of giving that incredible hook – one of the best to come out of the west coast in a long time – a new breath of life. And there is the hook for the whole album – this is serious jazz-rap ysht with a full band, immediately setting it apart from a lot of the bedroom/solo produced jazz-rap that is filtering out into the musical world these days. The Dough Boys are able to pull out a surprising number of sounds and feelings from within small, connected framework. The beautifully lilting summer love anthem “Your Man” floats down the ear canal, while “Blunt” comes in dense and heavy – much like the feeling of smoking a proper blunt. Very different songs, that both directly hit what they're trying to do while fitting incredibly nicely on the same record.
This is hip-hop and the Dough Boys make sure to allow their MC to be front and centre but the moments when they take the spotlight are arresting and impactful. Check the back half of “Collage” where BRAINiac's flow has gains big momentum just to stop dead and give way to a heart-aching saxophone solo. “Amidst Everything” floats on a cloud of spacey, drifting keys. I haven't thought of a guitar as a secret weapon in many years, but here on the Dough Boys' debut, the guitar is a shockingly effective weapon – like on “Thirst” where the guitar just gives the song such a perfect, slinky, sliding-through-the-night feeling. (Check out guitarist Ranger's generally fantastic solo output too. Especially this wonderful single.) And none of it works without a rhythm section, after all, this is hip-hop, and the rhythm section holds the proceedings together tightly.
With their smart, stoned-out, perfectly chilled debut, The Dough Boys are staking their claim as an act to watch on the west coast to watch. They've built a base for something special going forward. And even if they just stopped at this one album, they could rest easy known they've created a legit summer classic of an album.
Support the boys and pick up the album on Bandcamp (It’s also available to stream wherever you like to stream things.)