NNAMDÏ: Please Have A Seat
NNAMDÏ: Please Have A Seat
Secretly Canadian // Sooper Records (10/7/2022)
In the song “Armoire” NNAMDÏ envelops you within a vaulted church of synth, and he mounts the pulpit as the guest reverend to deliver a sermon. No fire and brimstone here, the rapper and multi-instrumentalist artist is a spiritual conduit full of empathy. He understands you and wants you to understand him. His latest album Please Have A Seat is an invitation into his world of anxiety, ambition, and relentless creativity. There’s an honest and earnest quality to the artist that’s hard to resist, even when he’s exposing the crass or self-absorbed parts of his personality that most of us would choose to keep hidden.
NNAMDÏPlease Have A Seat plays out like a game of musical chairs. There are plenty of places to land, but don’t get too comfortable. It takes seven songs into the album until we reach one that’s over 2:30. NNAMDÏ is a studio perfectionist who can whip up addictive sound conceits, but he doesn’t always give them a long leash. Fair enough. In a music marketplace dominated by streaming service engagement – drive-by eardrums – you don’t want to waste time.
In the album format, though, the people who stood in line for the rollercoaster don’t want the train to freeze up on the tracks every 15 seconds. It kills the momentum. That’s not a problem if the audience you’re targeting may never listen to the whole record in one sitting, from start to finish. Please Have A Seat plays to the playlist crowd, habituated more to mixtape drops than album releases. That’s a fruitful approach to music making in 2022, but it doesn’t give the artist’s creativity much room to breathe. Happily, NNAMDÏ unfolds his musical ideas at a more leisurely rate elsewhere on the album.
How does “ANXIOUS EATER” last 4:09? An ornate choral intro, conjured up in a hall of mirrors with NNAMDÏ’s vocals layered atop each other and caught up in a conversation with themselves. Further, what looks like one song here, feels more like a half a dozen musical jazz, rock, and hip hop concepts looped together like pearls on a string. The artist is unafraid of taking stylistic hairpin turns within the same stanza, never mind the same song. Shades of MGMT, and Flying Lotus, and Thomas Pidcock on Stage 12 of the 2022 Tour de France, in terms of taking those turns at death-defying speeds.
How does “Dedication” last 3:42? The song employs more traditional pop structures (albeit juiced & screwed), longer instrumental breakdowns, and a sustained gospel-style call & response that could roll along for hours. Plus, add in a goof audio collage at the tail end of the track for good measure.
How does “Lifted” last 3:55? A low tempo stretches out the whole proceedings and the latter half of the track is a slow build, a crescendo, that you can’t rush without spoiling the effect. NNAMDÏ takes his time and achieves his purpose. A song called “Lifted” has got to lift, right?
How does “Some Days” last 5:15? The longest song of the album! The showman in NNAMDÏ makes sure that the last track on the album provides a big sendoff. By this album’s standards, the song is nearly operatic in its scope and length. The first 1:29 serves as a prelude, repeating the “ready to run” lyric introduced in the leadoff track. Please Have A Seat bookends itself as an album with the ambiguous phrase. Is NNAMDÏ running away? Running towards? In circles? Each possibility manifests its own scenery of emotional drama and spiritual conflict. The largely instrumental meditation that preoccupies “Some Days” explores each of these possibilities, separately and all at once, before self-eclipsing in an outro at 4:12 that is quiet to the point of non-existence.
What sticks with you most after a few run throughs of Please Have A Seat is the emotional connection that NNAMDÏ makes with the listener. Give him the Anton Webern Award for cutting to the quick. The right mix of confessional lyrics and sonic mood-shifting takes us on an emotional odyssey before we’ve even left port. He transports us into the emotional gravity of his personal fixations with seeming effortlessness, like his brief pop sketch of getting ghosted on “Benched”. The listener grasps the intense sense of loss and bewilderment. So, if at times NNAMDÏ ghosts his songs before they ghost him, we at least understand why.
