Lord JaH-monte OGBON & Navy Blue - Beautifully Black
(Jazz Rap, Abstract Hip Hop, East Coast Hip Hop)
Guided by Navy Blue's fantastic production, Jamonte Lyde's second album of the year hits even bigger heights than before. Production is low-key, textured and classy, and Lyde's expressive rapping ties it all together. Beautifully Black, while sonically similar to many other albums this year, has no parallels in vocal presence or personality.
☆☆☆½
I'm honestly surprised I haven't fatigued of the new, youthful abstract hip hop scene. It's dominated hip hop's underground since at least the mid-2010s, and there are so many albums in the vein every year that finding the gems is more difficult than in any other genre. The reward of that, though, is that the successes are uncontested in quality, a sound so timeless and haunting that nothing else will ever hit you in the same way as those rare diamonds. The scene's biggest strength is its inherent quality, using sounds so warm and familiar that even at its blandest, you'd be hard-pressed to call any of it particularly bad. Everyone who participates in the sound can do something new with it, making it even harder to decide who's truly worth your time.
Jamonte Lyde, who performs under the moniker Lord JaH-monte OGBON, has quickly become one of the names who should be on your radar by now. His voice is one of the most identifiable of his peers; closer to Danny Brown's sharply-delivered bars than the usual muted presence taken from the likes of Earl Sweatshirt and Mach-Hommy that have been idols for the genre's new talents. It allows him to be more sprightly than the rest, the smoothness of the beats he flows on able to be trampled on and subsequently cleaned up by the hyperactivity of Lyde's voice. He doesn't over accentuate this fact to the point of annoyance, but every word Lyde says is given some extra bite to it as it's sent with zero interference to your ears. When he spits "I wonder how she's been and if she'll ever know / that I was weak at the time I decided to let her go" on breakup thinkpiece I Miss You, the power behind his words makes it feel much more solid and aware of the mistakes Lyde made than the eyes-to-the-ground melancholy you often get from the quieter voices of the scene. His voice would almost certainly work better with production to match its intensity, even while Navy Blue puts together a spotless collection of beats for Lyde to pick from.
My wish for more saturated production aside, Navy Blue truly does a great job as a producer on Beautifully Black. While it's not always the production I think works best for Lyde's voice (just imagine how awesome Lyde's rapping on Where Are You? Part II would be with some pummeling percussion), what he is asked to do here is performed with delicacy and ease. Pulling from his usual gamut of orchestral strings and stitched-together jazz samplings, there's not a beat on Beautifully Black I'm disappointed by: Forever Love's regal organs and girlish vocal harmonies are made precisely to keep R&B feature Vintage comfortable and liquid while supplying a rhythmic pulse enough to give Lyde something to build bars atop. Navy balances every element his work needs at any given moment: a feature from sensual Queens rapper Kelly Moonstone? Upscale diner strings and methodical electric guitars are ready for battle on the buttery smooth Tried Your Best. Want something a little more hypnotic: Oh Nah, We Locked Boo has all the lurching kick drums and ambient crackles surrounding the electric pianos to let you loop the song for hours. Despite any issues I may have with artistic direction, Navy Blue does the job he's been assigned so well that those problems can be glossed over without a second thought.
I have to admit that, as the years have gone by, the sound of nostalgic, East Coast-style jazz rap doesn't seem to develop very often, and its big releases every year tend to disappoint me. It's exciting to find an artist like Lord JaH, carrying the fundamentals of the sound but giving it a pop of color and a swig of personality, that it's able to reignite my love for the genre. It's sometimes a task digging through the hundreds of releases the genre puts out every year, and I can only ever get to a fraction of them, but the ones worth staying for earn every single second of your time. Beautifully Black is without question one of those albums, and Lord JaH's most provocative group of songs to date. Give it a chance; there's no way you'll come out disappointed.
