Freebass 808 plays The Pour House Wednesday, Sept. 8, for Love is Local Vol. 2, a Hopscotch Music Festival pre-party curated by Eric Tullis. Tickets for the 9 p.m. show are $5.
The swirling abyss of cougars, cherry falcon blue cheetahs and French-kissing mermaids at the bionic bar are just a few of the many provocative images cosmic emcee Suede Galactic offers during the new mixtape from his duo, Freebass 808. Last year, along with producer Apple Juice Kid, the longtime Camp Lo emcee released the MoonBass EP, an enterprising test launch for this smart, imaginative hip-hop collaboration. With the release of this Mick Boogie-sponsored mixtape ahead of the duo’s debut LP, Liquid Love Spacedust, we now wonder if old Camp Lo fans will trust Suede’s blaxploitation lyrical suites set to the electro code of his fellow space-junkie drummer, Apple Juice. They’d best.
On 7th Galaxy/ Psychic Energy, the duo stays inventive but gets infectious. Apple Juice’s intelligent banging corrupts and coheres on “Survival Day,” his former Apple Juice Orchestra bandmate Jana Privette offering the salve beneath Suede’s soul-lifting, magic sermon. “Acid,” on the other hand, shows Apple Juice fusing all of the tremors of dubstep with his own perverted version of boom-bap, letting Suede get free as he ricochets multisyllabic gems off what we should assume are the walls of Suede’s crystallized war balloon: “Genius insanity/ doves cry for vanity/ mechanically, randomly aim at faces/ count geometry,” he advises.
Back here on earth, this thing is still a mixtape. That is, for all the goods, it’s still beset by a misguided R&B hook on a soggy rap ballad like “Out of This World” and a slouching, sugar-free “Sugar in the Koolade.” Remember, there’s no gravity out there in the 7th Galaxy, way beyond the “polka dot clouds where the volume is loud.”
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