The recent R&B boom has been a welcome one. Unafraid of hooks and warmth, the genre has turned out some of the most interesting and re-playable music over the past couple years. Frank Ocean’s masterful 2012 LP, Channel Orange, serves as a barometer, a sturdy monument of an album that defined an aesthetic. What’s come in Channel Orange’s wake, the reissue of The Weeknd’s depraved trilogy on major label and How To Dress Well’s skeletal Total Loss, shows a flexibility within the R&B tag in which Californian’s Inc. take full advantage of.
Inc, whose debut album No World, 4AD, have crafted something airy, slick, and assured on their first try. That confidence isn’t surprising, the brothers who make up Inc., Andrew and Daniel Aged, cut their teeth as session musicians for Pharrell and Raphael Saadiq. No World is built on Daniel’s spacey laid-back production, creating space for Andrew’s quiet singing voice. In a feature in The FADER, Andrew admits, Inc. walks the line of being a “wedding band, a land you don’t want to go into.” But that line isn’t ever crossed, the tracks appearing on the album may sound simple and bare, but it’s deceptive. No World is wonderfully done, built for love-sick mix tapes and night drives, it’s production and vocals coalescing into something measured and lush.
No World exists somewhere in between the nocturnal sensuality of Blue Lines-era Massive Attack and more recent experimental R&B like How To Dress Well or Autre Ne Veut. In “The Place,” Andrew repeats, “I feel like we’ve been here before,” which isn’t a confession as much as a concession. It’s not a bad place to be in, the track’s spine features sparse twinkling synth notes backed by Jamie xx style drums hits. As the first single 4ad released back in October and the first track on No World, it’s also a mission statement, setting the tone for the rest of the album.
The brothers stopped being session musicians, because according to Andrew in an interview with The Stool Pigeon, ““It’s almost like our jobs became archaic or outdated as so much music is more production-heavy now, I was playing soul and R&B and they used to want lead guitar on tracks, but now they don’t even need that.” They’ve taken that frustration to tape, crafting an album that sounds professional and slick but still fully human. Daniel, in that same interview with The Stool Pigeon, “There’s just something about touching it from start to finish. It’s hard for us not to touch everything.” Tracks like “Lifetime” are clever twists on 90’s top-40 slow jams, just wonky enough to avoid cliché, but still featuring the type of sugary melodies and hooks that got caught in the your head over-and-over. It’s the work of people who know what they’re doing, with everything in its right place.
While the album is incredibly solid, the album is sometimes cool to a fault, barely rising above body-temperature on “Seventeen” or “Your Tears.” They’re not bad, just unexceptional compared to highlights like “Lifetime” or “Angel.” The latter especially shines, a subtle track built on crawling down-tempo drums, the chorus pleads, “Take me to the river.” It’s an elemental plea atop a crushingly simple beat that works together beautifully.
Whether or not R&B will continue to have the spotlight, it’s certainly a genre that’s gotten a much-needed revisit. Inc.’s No World is a lovingly done up ode to the music the aged brother’s obsessed over as kids and never got the chance to helm as session musicians that fits in neatly amongst the recent greatest hits in the genre.
Grade: B+
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