Mood Ruff

I Do My Own Stunts

BY Kevin JonesPublished Jul 1, 2005

Nearly three years after trekking through the cold, cold north on their Antarctica EP, Winnipeg’s brothers from different mothers return to the stage with an album looking this time to match the heat of the impending summer months. On I Do My Own Stunts, the three-man squad of emcees — Odario, Spitz and DJ ICQRI — kick things off with an atmosphere free of pretence, mixing old school-style rhymes with company-B-type soldier songs about the girls they left back home. Sonically, the album plays diversity for all its worth, with smooth summer jams like the ICQRI-produced "Rocketship” sharing space with the fluttery vibe of "Slo Coach Train” and roots reggae feel of "Resident Mash up the President.” The old school hi-jinx of the record’s first portion give way to a noticeably introspective tone in the disc’s second half, a mood change that, if you’re not exactly paying attention to the lyrics, might leave you wondering where the party went. As a whole, however, I Do My Own Stunts shows a good deal of growth from these Peg City ambassadors.

What were you aiming for in putting together this album? Odario: I had a revelation that a lot of new hip-hop artists right now are different from the earlier generation of artists solely because people that were making music in the "golden age” were raised on funk and jazz, because that’s what they had to build on. The music was so new and so fresh that it was built from these other forms of music, where as [music of] the new artists today is derived from hip-hop, and that makes a huge difference in the production, the style and the content. It really thins out the quality. So, I wanted to make an album that came from someone that listens to jazz and funk, and music from the ’80s.

Do you find it hard to put together a cohesive album when you get a lot of different producers involved? We’re living in a "no-album era” right now, as I like to call it, because no album can get played from beginning to end these days. It’s such a singles-driven era these days where the ADD kids can’t even listen to a full song right through. So the idea of this album was to make an album for the ADD kids that goes in many different directions sound-wise and content-wise, so that is doesn’t sound like one long song. In order to do that we had to work with a lot of different people and, aside from that, you learn a lot by working with so many different people.
(Slo Coach)

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