Always Strive and Prosper, ASAP Ferg, ASAP Worldwide/Polo Grounds/RCA
It is hard to think of a hip-hop album with more heart, one with a narrative more thoroughly interwoven with the love of family and friends, than Always Strive and Prosper, the second full-length by ASAP Ferg, the restless experimenter of the ASAP crew.
Here is Ferg, remembering his reckless uncle, on Psycho: “Wanted to be like you, jail tat on the chest/With the rugged cornrows and a stab on my neck.” And here, celebrating his tough grandmother, on Let It Bang: “Grandma hid that hammer in her mattress from my uncle/He would listen to Wu-Tang while walking in the jungle.” On Beautiful People, Ferg’s mother shows up for some spoken-word poetry, in between rhymes from Chuck D and Ferg proclaiming, “Watch what you put in your body, so we can live it long.”
Always Strive and Prosper is a chaotic, buoyant album, moving at varying speeds and with different textures. But uniting it all is an almost pervasive feeling of warmth, a sense that its creator comes from a world where he’s surrounded by care, even if he doesn’t always return it. Let You Go, for example, is a striking, raw, A Tribe Called Quest-like song about the tensions between living a public life of misdeeds and trying to maintain a private life of faithfulness. It takes the form of a conversation between Ferg and his girlfriend, who woundedly reprimands him for his shabby attitude: “Downloaded your mixtape, it sound so good/But why you gotta say things that make me sound so small?”
What saves this heartfelt album from being overly maudlin is how grounded the emotion is — and also Ferg’s rapping, which is kinetic and antic. He is consistently inventive, pugnacious with syllables and prone to break into a husky, not-quite-steady singsong flow. He’s highly adaptable, from the manic squelches of Skrillex on Hungry Ham to the classic house-music revival by DJ Mustard and Stelios Phili on the excellent Strive, featuring Missy Elliott. Sometimes, as on the bonus track, Don’t Mind, Ferg just raps without frills.
Perhaps the tenor of this album is in part a response to the death last year of ASAP Yams, the spiritual father of the ASAP crew, who is honored here on Yammy Gang, which includes an interlude by Yams’ proud mother. It’s a salute to the power of memory, and a reminder that nothing — not art, not wealth, not fame — sustains like love.
— JON CARAMANICA, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
TriAngular III, Ralph Peterson Trio, Onyx/Truth Revolution
Some jazz drummers convey the sensation of floating through a groove. Ralph Peterson Jr. specializes in a more urgent and pressurized momentum: a runaway freight train, a bronco bolting out of the chute. Thirty years ago, that intensity put him at the center of a hard-bop resurgence. It’s still a potent trademark, as he proves on his new album, TriAngular III.
As the title suggests, this is a sequel: Peterson, 53, first released an album called Triangular on Blue Note in 1989. It featured an agile postbop trio, with Geri Allen on piano and Essiet Essiet on bass, playing a roughly equal proportion of originals and jazz standards. Triangular 2, with pianist David Kikoski and bassist Gerald Cannon, followed on the Sirocco label in 2000.
His partners on TriAngular III are brothers Zaccai Curtis, a pianist, and Luques Curtis, a bassist. Both are in their early 30s, but Peterson first met them in Boston during their conservatory years, which puts him in the position of a bandleader-mentor. As if to underscore that idea, Peterson includes three compositions by hard-bop pianist Walter Davis Jr., who filled that role in his own development in the early 1980s.
But the Curtis brothers bring strong insight and little trace of deference to their playing — notably on Backgammon, one of those Davis tunes. Their rapport with Peterson is proudly equilateral, especially whenever the trio toggles between swing and Cuban clave, as on a tumbling version of Joe Henderson’s Inner Urge. Zaccai Curtis, who can evoke Bill Evans in one moment and Mulgrew Miller in the next, also composed two standout tracks: Manifest Destiny, a dark modal churner, and Moments, an intriguing Afro-Latin tone poem.
The album was recorded live at Firehouse 12, a recording studio and performance space in New Haven, Connecticut, and it has a spark of rough immediacy, something that always serves Peterson well. On one of his own tunes, The Art of War, he sounds as if he were on the verge of self-combustion, though he always stays just on the right side of the line.
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Hope, Strumbellas, Glassnote
The Strumbellas have perfected a story arc that’s summed up in the title of their new album, Hope. Each song begins with a confession of flaws and fears: “I know it gets harder every single day/I know my darkness might never go away,” Simon Ward sings at the start of We Don’t Know. Then the band cues up a folksy, foot-stamping tune that builds momentum all the way up to a huge, happy singalong chorus — which might turn out to be the same confession recast as an affirmation. Ward’s voice often starts out nearly alone, scratchy and shaky; by the end of the song, he’s leading a multitude. It’s an arc of reassurance through community, a promise that we can get through this together. It’s as good-hearted as all get-out.
It’s also, for U.S. listeners, suspiciously similar to the approach of the Lumineers in their folksy, foot-stamping 2012 hit Ho Hey. But that may be a matter of national borders. The Strumbellas are from Canada, and released their debut EP in 2009, two years before the Lumineers’ debut. Hope, which was released last year in Canada, is their third album; their second, We Still Move on Dance Floors from 2013, won a Juno Award (Canada’s Grammy equivalent) for roots and traditional album of the year. Both the Strumbellas and the Lumineers were part of the same surge of retooled, pop-savvy folk-rock.
Although Ward proclaims, “I put a banjo up into the sky/It keeps us moving,” in Shovels and Dirt, and the band’s six-member lineup includes a fiddle, the Strumbellas don’t confine themselves to “roots and traditional” sounds on Hope. Chimes, an orchestra and massed voices arrive almost immediately in Spirits, the album’s first single, which declares, “I don’t want a never-ending life/I just want to be alive while I’m here.” Elsewhere there are echoes of the E Street Band’s sustained synthesizers and arena-scale marches.
Between the giant, smiley singalongs, there’s a little more darkness than the band’s sound suggests. The verses grapple with impulses toward destruction and self-destruction. “If I weren’t so selfish/I could hear your calls for help,” Ward sings in I Still Make Her Cry. But it’s rarely long before another huge chorus arrives to banish all misgivings.
— JON PARELES, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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