Scottish trio learns value of simplicity
The Scottish trio Young Fathers has been described as experimental hip-hop — when they’re not alternative R&B, when they’re not an electronic music outfit.
Now with the group’s 2018 effort, “Cocoa Sugar,” there’s a new way of looking at Young Fathers: pop.
“What is normal?” asks Alloysious Massaquoi, one-third of the group, when asked about being labeled. “How we’ve been operating seems normal, but it’s not to somebody else.”
It can be hard, for those familiar with the group’s back catalog, to hear Young Fathers’ music mentioned in the same genre as, say, Maroon 5. But the stripped-down nature of “Cocoa Sugar,” with more of an emphasis on melody and less on discordance, created several songs that, if commercial radio was even the slightest bit interesting, could make a station’s playlist.
To categorize an album like “Cocoa Sugar” as a single genre
is, as one might expect, reductive. The bass and beats per minute of “Wire” can be imagined on DJ sets everywhere, while the rhymes on “Toy” and “Holy Ghost” remind the listener of that “experimental hip-hop” label.
“We got to the essence of what the group is,” Massaquoi says. “We love melodies, we love to paint pictures with our words, but there’s a lot more space in the sonics of the track that allows you to take in what’s happening.”
A standout cut like “In My View” is straightforward, both in instrumentation and structure: verse, chorus, repeat. On “Lord,” a falsetto voice on the chorus helps hide anxiety-laden lyrics (“Joy hates the pain/ the pain we all need/ the pain we need to feel”).
Throughout, the album is accessible, not dense with every instrument in the studio.
“It’s about simplicity,” Massaquoi says. “Go to the most basic denominator of: You make sounds, you react to them. You can’t overthink. Overthinking that kind of process is where you restrict yourself.”
Overthinking was certainly not the plan for “Cocoa Sugar,” even with the band taking time for some rest after exhaustive touring support for its second album, “White Men Are Black Men Too.” Recording the album was more about the bandmates getting out of their own ways than anything else, in an effort to keep spontaneity as a part of what can be the drawnout process of recording an album.
“You want to put out there something that’s beyond you, and then you can grow into that,” Massaquoi says. “And the best way to do that is to capture something right off the cuff. We’ve done the process of going through recording the song, then you sit with it for two or three weeks, and you make it better or finesse it, yada yada yada. We get the exact same thing doing it very quickly. And isn’t that true to the nature of capturing something? It’s in the moment. You can feel it, you can respond to it.”
Does that add up to a pop record? It does, and it doesn’t, Massaquoi reckons.
"If anything, it being a non-typical pop song is a pop song in itself — those can be the ones that people react to more,” he says. “It’s simple enough to get, but it’s also something you can go back to.”