- Thundercat: “Drunk” (Drunk, Brainfeeder, 2017)
“Drowning away/All of the pain/Till I’m totally numb”—there’s not a tremendous amount of fun in Thundercat’s short ode to dissipation. The bassist and vocalist is barely hanging on here. His romantic life is confusing and contradictory, he’s either paranoid or speaking in paranoid metaphors (“Squirrels and snakes keep me on my toes”), and he’s disgusted by fakery (“LOL I’m so over it/’Cause nothing is real”). Throughout, his falsetto is awash in echo and surrounded by surreal pulsations of guitar and electronics—suggesting that his senses are giving way. Far too quirky to enter the standard repertoire, it’s nonetheless as melancholy and self-stroking in Thundercat’s milieu as “One for My Baby” is in Sinatra’s. (The situation won’t end well, either; two tracks later on the Drunk album comes “DUI.”)
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