Chris Daly eats peanut butter every day on the daily
Let’s be honest with ourselves: one can never have too much jazz or hip-hop in one’s life. If you’re anything like me, you’re obviously attractive and well loved by everyone, but you also prefer your musical forays to go the backpack route. When you get a Voltronic Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup’s that combines all that into one wafer thin mint of audio deliciousness, well, hell, jack in your headphones, sit back, relax, and let’s call it a day.
Way back in 2013, Leeds-based Paper Tiger dropped their debut, Laptop Suntan on the venerable Wah Wah 45s label. The sextet, comprised of Greg Surmacz (saxophone, laptop, loops), Raphael Attar (vox), Matt Davies (drums, electronic drums), Tom Henry (synths, keys), James Wiltshire (bass) and Vital (DJ, samples), plays a unique hybrid of live instruments backed by electronic production techniques that lands somewhere between BadBadNotGood, Thundercat, DOOM and Flying Lotus. Basically, it’s an amalgam of the best of multiple underground scenes.
While their first album was undergoing final production touch-ups and hand-offs, the boys in the band released the first in what has become the Sonic Boom Head Zoom mixtape series, portions of which ended up as short interludes on Laptop Suntan. With the recent release of their remix follow-up Sultan Ant Pop, PT went the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” route and now we have SBHZ2 for your Sun Ra-inspired listening pleasure. Once again, the gang went into the studio for a full day and recorded completely live and improvised. The result is a grab bag of goodness–some space funk here, some avant-garde jazz there, grooves a plenty and mad fine, often hilarious, rhymes from Attar.
