Entitled – GottaLuvIt (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Imagine a rap song or hip-hop track only without the actual vocal delivery. That is what you have going on here. This is the sound of a commercial artist laying out their wares, and to a degree, that is what GottaLuvIt is doing here, as there is certainly that aspect to the music. But, like all music, it goes beyond merely a way of touting your skills and, of course, Entitled is a musical entity in its own right. How could it not be?

I’ve said more than once before that one of the advantages of making instrumental music is that there aren’t any lyrics to pull or push the listener’s imagination around or to take them to places they might not otherwise have journeyed to on their own. But of course, there is another reason why instrumental music has the edge over its narrated or sing-along brethren, and that is because, without a vocalist howling what can often be best described as unpoetic nonsense over the top of everything, you can appreciate what is going on in the music itself.

So, what we find with Entitled is a track designed to be added to by its eventual lyricist, whoever that might be, crafted with the agility of an instrumental track. Too many artists in the electronic realm and the urban sonic enclave may see what lies underneath the lyrics as just a mechanism to drive their message. Here, we find a track crafted with the same care as the lyricists build their dexterous and decisive wordplay.

Spacious beats wander slightly off-kilter grooves as a skittering, trap-infused percussive tick ebb and flow in and out. The main riff has all the hallmarks of a classic soul salvo, only slowed down and rendered into electronic rather than brass or guitar sounds. There is poise and purpose to the pacing of the song, indicating that it has left space for the lyrics to thread their way through this instrumental landscape.

And although, given what I have said about this being, for want of a better phrase, a work-in-progress piece, such is its construction that you can almost hear where the lyrical lines go, where the vocal deliveries power through or fall back, where the spaces between the word salvos go and where they will become the focal point.

The sign of any instrumental track such as this is that it conjures additional sonics in the listener’s mind. All it needs is for someone to come along and write the words, although I get the feeling that, given the astuteness of the track, they would pretty much write right themselves.