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Daddy X - Family Ties
- California alt-rocker Daddy X's second solo effort Family Ties, drops into the marketplace next week courtesy of his self-owned and operated label Suburban Noize.
This sophomore follow-up to his debut CD "Organic Soul" is not X's best work. The lead-off track "All Seeing Eye" tries energetically to be a call to self-awakening revolution from a Big Brother type institution such as the governing body we live within now (that I almost wrote "live under" scares me because of my own mentality towards this administration). I say tried, because when considering artists like Tupac Shakur, who sang/rapped about similar topics a decade ago, X's effort seems musically and lyrically immature by comparison.
I don't mean to sound unappreciative of X's intentions, it's just that people who have the mic like X, who have the opportunity to reach an audience willing to listen, have to deliver lyrics like "it's time we embrace change" more creatively than this to get attention by a wider audience, and not just a niche audience who like loud production without nuance or subtlety. That said, props to using the word "menstruate" as a metaphor alongside the lyric "...clean the slate". I couldn't have done it any better, even if I'd wanted to try.
Speaking of Tupac, tracks like X's "Changin'" are more effective in this effort, though it is basically a rehash of the same idea of the first track, and if you forget the point, he repeats the title word no less than 30 times in case we forget. It is however more lyrical and easier to digest than "All Seeing Eye", and it is a welcome shift change from the overdrive that is the latter (though if you for some reason need to buy a track with the same title, stick to Tupac's "Changes"... total classic).
Not that all music should be "digestible" to everyone, as that would of course be boring. I know there are going to be bands and artists that I'm not going to understand, and philosophically they wouldn't want a gen-X white Italian Jewish registered Republican NYer in his late 20's to understand them either. However, I would like to think that even though I'm not going to understand certain things, I would at least hope to recognize ability and creativity.
There is a trap that artists will occasionally fall into. In the quest for popularity and mass appeal, artists will devote time and energy into style as a form of substance, forgetting that there needs to exist substance under the style for that to work effectively. Prince, Kiss, and even Mudvayne come to mind as artists that have balanced these two successfully (and it should be noted that I don't like two of those three listed references, but I do respect their ability and artistry).
If Daddy X wants to reach a broader audience, he's going to want to devote more time to discovering what he wants to say and how to be saying it, rather than figuring out what volume to be saying it at.
Reviewer: David Fallo
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Reviewer's Rating: 6
Reader's Rating: 0
Reader's Votes: 0
Added: 20-Feb-2006
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