We Never Asked For This is our short review of a band who thought (or their label/manager/agent/girlfriend thought) that it would be a good idea to send us an email saying “like me! like me! like me!” (more or less).
Today’s blind submission comes from the dub and soul influenced San Francisco group The neyBuzz.
While not a genre we would go to on a regular basis, we do appreciate dub music in small quantities, and there is no denying that when in the right mood it can be just about the perfect soundtrack. The neyBuzz from San Francisco is a collective who use dub as starting point to explore soul, funk and even a touch of traditional Jamaican ska. It’s the instrumental tracks from this group that really do it for us like “False Gods & Petty Tyrants” which allows what sounds to be a melodica to build a simple but beautiful melody line, or “REvolution” which matches the melodica (again I’m just guessing but that’s what it sounds like) with a more percolating music bed to float over while an organ and guitar do some call and response to the main melody. A few of the stronger vocal tracks are “Captain Buzzkill” and “Ninja” which feature the singer 80 Bug, whose delivery mixes traditional Jamaican melodies with the best qualities of modern hip-hop r&b singers like Mary J. Blige and Lauryn Hill. While not something we’ll likely be jamming to on the regular, The neyBuzz was a tasty trip outside of our usual sandbox. Check out our selected tracks below.
“False Gods & Petty Tyrants”
“REvolution”
“Captain Buzzkill”
“Ninja”
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