plorentz's Full Review: Lovehate [PA] by The-Dream
Say it's an ordinary Monday back at the office. You shrug your way into your ergonomically correct rolling desk chair and set up a triage unit in your overflowing e-mail inbox separating the spam from the read & delete, the read & file, and the read & forward-on-to-somebody-else-to-do-something-about-it messages with coffee-fueled efficiency. Meanwhile, that red message light on your phone blinks insistently to remind you that you haven't checked your voice mail, and as it does, it does so in time with the tiniest fragment of a pop song hook that you suddenly become aware of replaying itself on a loop in your head. Blink. Blink. Ella! Ella! Blink. Blink. Eh! Eh! It's a hazard boldly faced by anyone who at any time since, say, May of last year, has tuned their radio to a Top 40 station and has therefore been exposed to "Umbrella", a melodic infection as ingeniously primitive as a virus and as dangerously potent as box of anthrax.
Rihanna may be credited on the single, which no less substantial (however annoying) an eminence than Robert Christgau called the most iconic single of 2007, but the mastermind of this particular attempt at world domination is songwriter-producer Terius Nash, who, calling himself The-Dream and teaming up with production cohort C. "Tricky" Stewart, has just released his debut studio album Love/Hate, a record teeming with enough old-fashioned horniness and hip-hop-pop-R&B alchemy to make Justin Timberlake weak-kneed. The-Dream isn't about to let us forget his writer's credit for "Umbrella" - he peppers the introductions of some of his songs with congratulatory ella! ella! shout-outs, and his hooks and ad-libs are littered with eh! eh!-ing. The-Dream exploits that superstar syllable with all the unscrupulous gusto of a driven Hollywood agent, but let it be known here and now that Terius The-Dream Nash is no one-hook-wonder: Love/Hate, like the titular shawty in The-Dream's debut single, is da sh*!. (Or, if you've only heard it on the radio, "a ten.")
That song opens the album with a bubble-gum vocal hook and a sing-song rap by Fabolous in which the rapper memorably speculates on what shawty's actual name is - Tia, perhaps, or Aaliyah - The-Dream sings her praises in a pinched, nasally staccato that owes more to New Edition than it does to Ne-Yo, expressing his admiration not just for her obvious skills in the sack, but also for the pancakes and bacon she makes in the morning: you should tip her, he repeatedly implores, only to have the name-to-be-determined Shawty interrupt corroboratively: You should tip me! The pleasures of "Shawty Is Da Sh*!" are both immediate and surprisingly leggy, but as the rest of the album proves, Terius and Tricky have a whole bag of magic tricks, and The-Dream delivers these goods with an effortlessly funny (but ultimately disciplined) schtick worthy of a modern day hip hop vaudevillian. The chorus of the album's second single "Falsetto" is as shamelessly (but somehow charmingly) ribald as a Porky's joke.
Where a lot of recent hip-hop upstarts have paid tribute to their forebears with sped-up dirty samples of 70s soul records, The-Dream comes up with his own synthesis of what he idolized in his idols, stealing Prince's hoochie-as-sports car metaphor wholesale (right down to the "have you got enough gas" line) and making it new again - albeit with a synthesizer line and percussion reminiscent of "When Doves Cry" - in the tantalizing "Fast Car", just before delivering the scathing tell-off of "Nikki". The genius of "Nikki" is that, with its brooding, sexually sinister groove, it evokes yet another Prince song (guess which one), but it also may be paying direct tribute to the song in its lyrics: I've been making love to Nikki, he sneers. She loves me back! And did I mention that the fierce guitar solo - yes, guitar solo - in "Falsetto" sounds like something Prince might have tucked away in his Purple Rain-era attic? Oh, and there's a song called "Purple Kisses", too.
But though he might wear his primary influence on his sleeve, Love/Hate is clearly the work of an original, fully-formed talent, and songs like the gorgeous "She Needs My Love" and "Livin' a Lie" (a duet with Rihanna) are built around complex and layered vocal arrangements, and set against thick, entrancingly minimal bass throbs and vintage synth sounds. The five-minute "Ditch That..." hints alluringly at Mr. Nash's ambition, it's a fierce hip-hop mini-opera that makes some wholly unexpected musical leaps on its way to a violently urgent climax, before slinking back menacingly on a wordless coda - all beat and vibe. Meanwhile, the album closes with the unabashedly pretty and becomingly unfinished piano-ballad "Mama". The whole album is loaded with enough sonic candy it'll make your teeth hurt just to think about it. But like a dishful of Jellybellies, it thwarts any attempt at resistance. The-Dream came to play. I can't wait to hear where he goes with this.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Love/Hate" by The-Dream
Radio Killa / DefJam Records
Released 12/11/2007
Produced by Terius "The-Dream" Nash and C. "Tricky" Stewart
56 min.
SONGS: Shawty is Da Sh*! - I Luv U Girl - Fast Car - Nikki - She Needs My Love - Falsetto - Playin' in Her Hair - Purple Kisses - Ditch That... - Luv Songs - Livin' a Lie - Mama
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