|
1st Born Second
08/07/2001 8:18 PM, Yahoo! Music
Dan Leroy
On the strength of a few gigs and guest shots (most notably, singing backup for D'Angelo appearing on Common's Like Water For Chocolate), 22-year-old Bilal Oliver has been anointed the second coming of Prince and the point man of the new soul movement. That seems more than a tad premature, even after you listen to his long-awaited debut album, but you can certainly hear what's giving critics their collective woody.
If it isn't quite the debut that new soul touchstones like D'Angelo's Brown Sugar and Erykah Badu's Baduizm were, it's certainly far more ambitious, with ear-opening hybrids like the jazz-into-gospel-into-His Royal Badness "Sometimes" and the psychedelic soundscape of quot;Second Child."But Bilal also shows his mainstream hip-hop cred, recruiting Dr. Dre to produce the G-Funky "Fast Lane" and getting Mos Def to drop rhymes with Common on "Reminisce." His voice--an androgynous instrument that can slide easily from Nina Simone-cool to a hair-raising falsetto worthy of the Artist in his heyday--is so remarkable throughout that it's tempting to believe Bilal's farther along than he actually is. Based on the evidence here, though, it sounds like he's gonna get there--and when he does, look out.
|
