It doesn’t take long to get to the heart of what this latest ep from Comatose Red Ivy is all about. Smoking. Weed, Pot, Mary-Jane. Being high, stoned, baked, blazed. And why not? Worse things are being championed through mainstream music. Much worse. And although we hear the word freestyle much overused these days, a term now synonymous with merely a lyrical delivery, rather than an improvised and dexterous, stream of consciousness flow, it is definitely to the latter that CRI leans.
Be it the bathtub, bed or car or walking down the street, you can hear the creative process in action – the synapsis pop as the thought is born, the thought becoming words, the words riffing on an idea – a wonderfully unplanned outpouring of attitude and ideas, wordplay and counter-culture wisdom.
The songs slide along on lazy trap beats and skittering percussion, squiggly electronica and weird, beguiling sonics but as always with music made in such improvised, first-take ways, it is the lyrics that are the star of the show. I guess that the target audience is going to be someone who also partakes in the herb themselves, they are going to get the terminology and the in-jokes, they are going to be on the same hazy-wave-length and share the same hopes and goals. But there is also something very engaging to be found here, even if you are just the casual listener. The strange conversational manner, the free-form looseness, the fact that the music is not only about smoking marijuana but seems to have been made by an artist who is as high as a kite.
But then it wouldn’t work if things were too planned and it is this looseness and languour, this honesty and off the cuff delivery which is the real charm.
