Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

The Playlist VibeZ

Fifteen tracks from a band-and-singer project that produced one of the most overlooked soul albums of the last decade.

Eric-Roberson-Playlist-Retreat

The PLAYlist featuring Glenn Lewis

Glenn Lewis is a Toronto singer whose 2002 single "Don't You Forget It" made him briefly one of the most promising voices in R&B, and whose career thereafter was derailed by the usual combination of label politics and bad timing. He has one of the most agile high tenors in the music, and for fifteen years it went mostly unused.

The PLAYlist is the project that changed that: a musicians' collective who built a full album of live-instrument soul around him, released in 2017 as Chasing Goosebumps. It is exactly the record his voice deserved and almost nobody heard it.

The playing is the point. This is a band record in the seventies sense — real bass, real drums, horn arrangements, and a singer given room to do what he does rather than a track to fit into.

What to listen for

"CHASING GOOSEBUMPS" is the title track and the best introduction — a slow build that gives Lewis space to climb, which is what he was always best at.

"DIE EMPTY" opens the record and is the most ambitious arrangement on it.

"1995" is the most nakedly nostalgic thing here and the most affecting, and "FIRST TIME AGAIN" works the same territory.

"STONE COLD" and "DEFEATED" with Dayne Jordan are the two that bring a rapper in, and both are better for it — the contrast between Jordan's flat delivery and Lewis's falsetto is the record's best trick.

"TAKE MY TIME" is the smoothest, "SUPERMAN" is the most anthemic, and "LULLABY" is the quietest.

"DISTRACTION" with Rich Medina is the DJ's inclusion, and "MR. GRUMP" and "KELO AND KAIDI BE SNORING" are the domestic, funny ones — a reminder that this is a record made by grown people about grown lives.

Go deeper

Chasing Goosebumps (2017) is the album and it works far better heard whole than shuffled.

Glenn Lewis's World Outside My Window (2002) is the debut that should have made him a star, and it is worth hearing to understand what was lost. For the wider tradition of band-backed contemporary soul, follow The Foreign Exchange, Kings Go Forth and Durand Jones & The Indications.

Why it deserved better: a great voice with nothing to sing over is one of the more common tragedies in this music, and this project is the correction. Real players, written arrangements, and a singer finally given room to climb — which is exactly what his instrument was built for and exactly what fifteen years of label politics had denied him.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more