gNotes - "Rhymes and Beats"

gNotes - Samba Tryst (Gnawledge 2007)

gNotes - Rhymes and Beats / Gnawledge

We recently mentioned the Boston hip-hop scene via Y Society's Insight. We got a bona fide Bostonian for you this week, and it's possible that if you've been paying attention you may already have heard about gNotes. This cat is right about what I need to wind 2K7 down on a high note. There's a pun in there somewhere, but I'll let you find it.

And I'll leave Sean Dwyer to do the verbal gymnastics for me. His boom-bap beats break out immediately on the opener to this record, "Muddy Treble Clef." It's an aggressive song that reminds me of Aesop Rock, or maybe Sage Francis. Dwyer sounds like he's just reaching the end of his breath at the end of every wordy line, and it makes not only his delivery breathless but your ears breathless too. This is exactly the effect that has worked so well for the Rhymesayers collective and backpackers everywhere else. You're being thrown into the fire of this album before you've ever really had a chance to decide if you even want to step inside. You're not even finished with the first song and it's already too late. It's a clear trick of the ears, but it works everytime... And that's why we keep coming back.

"I'm talkin' to the earthworms and ostriches / Caddymacks, battle cats and hipster hip-hopper kids." So basically, everybody who reads and writes this blog should have their ears primed for the 14 songs on this full-length. Its solid production and delivery isn't the work of an amateur. It deserves mentioning that Dwyer actually got his start in 2004 with Broken Spoke, an MC debut that acted as the basis for what was to come. His entire music career has been building to the uncreatively titled Rhymes and Beats, but given his drive and passion it would be hard to imagine the man sitting in the production studio thinking of any other title for his personal magnum opus.

Here's how it worked following Broken Spoke: gNotes set up two halves of the same whole with an album that revolved entirely around rhymes (2005's Flow From Above) related to issues of "global justice and social responsibility." The other half, naturally, was beats (Inthrumental). gNotes used slide guitar to complement Afro DZ ak's trumpet work for an intriguing exploration of instrumentation based around traditional hip-hop thumping.

The only thing left to do was bring it together for a complete statement. So arrives album #4: "Rhymes and beats grown mature." He definitely sounds like he's got his act together, even right down to sequencing. The single "Throw Your Nickels Up" has the same feel as "Muddy Treble Clef," but the pace is wisely slowed down for the soulful third and fourth songs, "Tower of Babylon" and "We Can Roll." From here things follow a more midtempo trip for the middle section of the album as the listener relies more on Dwyer's wordplay than in-your-face bells n' whistles.

Evan Tanguy writes that the sometimes "difficult lyrics are difficult to translate for the average listener, which can hurt aspiring artists like him." We respectfully disagree. Unless you're Dälek (and there can be only one of those), beats are only going to get you so far. To be fair, the live instrumentation used on this record (to great effect on a track like the synthy "Nemesis" or the guitar-cum-trumpet climax of "Samba Tryst") is certainly worth mentioning. "Nemesis" marks a turn back for where the music catches up to the lyrics and the two reach that maturity gNotes had been seeking since he got his start three years ago. Likewise, "Samba Tryst" is arguably the highlight of the album.

But it's your lyrics, your verbal flourishes, your mind-melting meter, that's the bread and butter of hip-hop. That's where you're going to earn your respects. Dwyer duly accomplishes this with clever twists, puns and a delivery that can fascinate even when the song should be putting you to sleep (as on the piano bar ballad "Missin' You"). Unlike a lot of MCs, his lyrics are readily available on the Gnawledge website, so I won't burden anymore than I have to. Sometimes the actual words themselves don't matter so much as the way they are delivered, speeding up and slowing down as necessary.

Dwyer is adroit enough to make his words fit the music. The payoff is that the music returns the favor: Rhymes and Beats is a series of songs that exposes the diligent work of a man that raps like he's been waiting for this album his whole life. Maybe that's true. Finding biographical information on Dwyer is difficult, partly because he's not sucking up to a major and partly because people who are afraid of abstruse words strung together swiftly feel alienated. It's plausible that he's been making music his whole life. At the end of this album, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that you're left feeling there was little to be improved upon. For all the people Sean Dwyer is speaking to, it's himself that he's speaking to loudest. To thine ownself be true, and the truest colors will shine through. Few are shining brighter than gNotes right now.