Serengeti
(Anticon)
Serengeti, the Chicago-born, LA-based rapper David Cohn, inhabits nearly a dozen different personas on his Family & Friends and sheds additional sympathetic light on a large cast of bystanders. Whether he's embodying the exhausted bigamist of "Goddamit" or the wistful young man connecting with his dad through drugs on "Long Ears" or the washed-up UFC gladiator in "The Whip", he observes without judging. Friends & Family is more like a short-story collection than poetry, though it has its share of arresting lines.
This ability to channel other viewpoints is nothing new for Serengeti. His best known song, after all, is "Dennehy," told from the viewpoint of the Budweiser-swilling, Chicago Bears-loving, Polish-American Kenny, and about as far removed from a half-black, half-Jewish MC's orbit as the moons of Pluto. Here, however, Serengeti seems to dip further into personal experience. "California," for instance, told from the obtusely cheerful viewpoint of a recently divorced self-improvement addict, follows Cohn's own move to the Golden State. "Long Ears," a multigenerational saga of addiction, neglect and fragile connection, may come, in part, from the family members' drug problems that Cohn has talked about in interviews. There are no panoramic political statements here, but through the accumulation of details about families in stress and downward mobility, you get a sense of economic turmoil. "Dwight," the album's closer, is particularly chilling in this regard, moving from a young couple buying a new home to bankruptcy, the husband stepping over his wife's sleeping form on the back steps by the end.
Musically, Family & Friends has a definite slant towards the indie pop, produced as it was by Yoni from WHY? and Owen Ashworth (here credited as Advanced Battery Base, but otherwise known as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone). Ashworth's signature Casio and drum-machine sound permeates the album. Even "The Whip," the album's stunning centerpiece, couches its darkness in high piping keyboards and the dry thwack of programmed snare. Its tale - of a UFC fighter almost making a name for himself, then gradually fading from view - is gently, empathetically tragic, the violence at the center of the fighter's life offset by his love for caged wrens and the way he lives quietly with his mother. "Goddamit," the other highlight, is almost as sympathetic, this time to a man who marries a second, 17-year-old wife and spends the song trying to maintain two lives.
Family & Friends is full of small tragedies, closely observed and beautifully detailed, and told in a way that makes clear that even the main characters don't realize how sad their lives have become. It is leavened, almost contradicted, by the sunniness of its melodies, the delicacy of its indie pop arrangements. The result is a deeply humane album, it makes poetry out of the disappointments of daily existence and narrative out of the mistakes that people make.
DOWNLOAD: "The Whip," "Goddamit" JENNIFER KELLY
