When you tag a release with the 'instrumental hip hop' label, it has some tough prejudices to fight ("it's not hip hop if it doesn't have rhymes," "Prefuse has already done this better," etc.) Pedro is a scrappy little welterweight of a debut, but the odds are stacked against him taking any belts from the bruisers above in his tussles with these expectations. He's evidently friendly with the competition: a remix disc is included where Prefuse 73, Danger Mouse, Four Tet and others put their signature combinations of punchy, protean beats and evanescent noise on top of Pedro's originals. Unfortunately for P, the remix disc is, pound for pound, more impressive than his solo effort. He even tops himself on track 4, his alternate version casting about with more nervous energy than the original, which, like many of the tracks, can lack some drive.
The most successful instrumental hip hop compensates for the lack of an MC's swagger with creative beatshaping, audacious sampling, and reliance on the element of surprise. By contrast, Pedro is a reflective, orchestral effort that ends up sounding more like it lacks Ben Gibbard than Biggie Smalls. Bringing in instruments like organ (pipe, not Hammond) and harp are intriguing moves, but Pedro lets them complete melodies and hold down bars all by themselves, braking the momentum of the song, whereas Herren would simply punch them in and pull them out quickly, dislocating the fragile structures he had already built (see the opener of Fear and Resilience, or track 10 of Prefuse's Surrounded by Silence, where he reworked some of the material from this [Pedro's] album last year). Pedro succeeds when his song structures become more adventurous. "123," for example, is a lovely survey of Tamborello electro-pop, late '80s hip hop drums, and clever instrumentation that heads in myriad directions but never loses coherence. Elsewhere, it can seem like he's a little cautious with jabs and hooks that should be coming in more aggressive combinations. Artists with more experience and panache crowd this ring, but Pedro's debut still lands a number of good blows. I'm interested in seeing what he brings to round two.
Pedro
1. Intro
2. Fear & Resilience
3. Dead Grass
4. These Pixels Weave a Person
5. The Water Ran this Way Back and Forth
6. 123
7. All Things Rendered
8. Seven Eight
9. Outro
Fear and Resilience
1. Prefuse 73
2. Cherrystones
3. Danger Mouse
4. Pedro
5. Home Skillet
6.
7. Four Tet
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