Many artists claim to be “experimental,” or “genre-hopping” or even “avant-garde” when all they are doing is making a few half-hearted changes to the conventional musical template. Well, those artists need to listen to Make Room Music in general and Unorthodox Beats in particular before they start giving themselves such dubious and self-aggrandising titles.
Unorthodox Beats is a place of controlled collisions, a place where genres truly mix and merge into new forms, where well-established sounds are subverted by cutting edge creation, where the past and the present dance deftly into the future.
There are soulful grooves sprinkled with graceful, chiming motifs, such as the aptly named Dreamy and there are atmospheric, and slick slow jams such as Back 4 U. Feels Like You adds an ambient edge to neo-soul, A Feeling blends classical grace with clubland cool and Brown Sugar is a bubbling, skittering, futuristic fusion.
There is an overall vibe to the album, one not driven by sound or style but instead more due to an attitude or approach. And it is an attitude of calm and cool and of understatement and total control, of less is more and, if that is so, then that even less is sure to be even more.
Unlike most music being made today, Unorthodox Beats is not concerned with genres. It is, perhaps, a masterclass of how unimportant they are and how conforming to one is the death knell of originality. Make Room Music revels in the art of the DJ, the sampler, the musical magpie and Unorthodox Beats feels like you have climbed up to look in the nest and what you find is an array of glorious objects, as unexpected and intricatley woven together as they are glorious and beguiling.
