Recording of the Week, BADBADNOTGOOD, 'Talk Memory'

There was a time when Canadian trio BADBADNOTGOOD were the go-to jazz band in alternative music circles. Always a favourite in hip-hop circles, they enjoyed an early popularity in hip-hop circles thanks to Tyler the Creator, member of rap collective Odd Future, giving a shout-out to the trio’s medley of the collective’s beats. True to the cyclical relationship between hip-hop and jazz music, the trio’s mutual love of hip-hop saw many of their early releases filled with nu-jazz interpretations of rap beats, themselves sampled from bebop records of the past. The first few years of the band’s existence saw a string of releases, with their eponymous debut and sophomore albums - 2011’s BBNG and 2012’s BBNG2 - featuring a mixture of these hip-hop covers, as well as contemporary pop songs like Leslie Feist’s ‘Limit to Your Love’ or Kanye West’s ‘Flashing Lights’, and even closing out their first album with a nine-minute medley of music from the classic video game ‘The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’. But it wasn’t until their third album, 2014’s appropriately-titled III, that the trio started to truly come into their own, being their first album of wholly original material and the group’s true breakout recording; 2016’s IV was an incredibly varied record that featured the band’s first vocal guest spots, as well as marking the official joining of multi-instrumentalist and frequent collaborator Leland Whitty into the band. This is not to mention their 2015 collaboration with Ghostface Killa of Wu-Tang Clan fame, Sour Soul, further cementing the band’s credit in both jazz and hip-hop circles.

Talk Memory marks the first new full-length for BBNG in five years - though there have been a smattering of singles and collaborations in-between - as well as the first since the departure of founding member and keyboardist/synth player Matthew Tavares in 2019 (though he remains an occasional contributing songwriter). Despite being a trio once again, much like IV, Talk Memory features a handful of guest stars, including jazz drummer Karriem Riggins, harpist Brandee Younger and string arrangements from Brazilian singer-songwriter Arthur Verocai, who despite starting his career in the ‘70s and falling into obscurity experienced a renewed cult following in the early 2000s. These guest collaborators seldom take the centre stage, though; Talk Memory is a record that revels in improvisation, and these guest players slot right into these free-flowing tracks. That being said, Brandee Younger’s gorgeous harp solo that closes out the final track ‘Talk Meaning’ is one of my personal highlights of the album, one of the few times a guest star gets the opportunity to shine.

The band puts their first musical foot forward on Talk Memory with ‘Signal from the Noise’, a nine-minute psychedelic jazz jam co-produced by electronic artist Sam Shepherd, known by his alias Floating Points. A fuzzed-up bass guitar - I can’t help but think of John Wetton of prog rockers King Crimson - leads the charge, with the dancing ensemble of flutes and saxophones almost having a mellotron-like quality to them in how dense they are. Far from catchy pop hooks, a track like ‘Unfolding (Momentum 73)’ is all about the atmosphere, though Verocai’s string arrangements give the track a vintage baroque pop kind of vibe - throughout the album bringing a welcome brightness to the otherwise quite moody pieces. Tightly-constructed, groovy tracks like ‘Beside April’ show that the band haven’t lost their compositional edge even amongst these looser instrumental tracks, while Sowinski keeps it together whilst pulling off a near-breakbeat-style pattern on ‘Timid, Intimidating’. Let’s not forget that these guys can shred when they feel like it, too.

BADBADNOTGOOD have always been a band that only ever do what they wanted - no matter how relevant or not it keeps them. While they could well have embraced the success of IV’s vocal-led tracks - that album’s ‘Time Moves Slow’ saw a renewed interest earlier this year thanks to the viral success of a remix posted on the social media app Tiktok - but Talk Memory feels like the band drawing more on those first few albums, eschewing the wider exposure that vocal collaborators brought them and focusing in on the excitement of improvisation and dense instrumental composition. Far from hitting the reset button, though, BADBADNOTGOOD show that they’re just as curious as ever, drawing from a wider pool of sounds than ever before - and when you throw in the spontaneity pervasive throughout the album, it sounds like they’re having a lot of fun while doing it.