RJD2 Since We Last Spoke CD

On his second full-length album, the East Coast hip-hop luminary RJD2 does for vintage rock what he did for vintage funk on his auspicious debut, DEAD RINGER. He cuts it up, filters it through a DJ sensibility, and rearranges it into something that's undeniably greater than the sum of its parts.

Where DEAD RINGER's samples were mostly R&B-based, here "Someone's Second Kiss" mixes breathy vocal samples with ethereal guitar against a rock backdrop, while "Exotic Talk" sounds like a neighborhood garage band rehearsing in their parents' basement with a laptop and an improbably cool flute player. RJD2 hasn't abandoned R&B, though--"Clean Living" nimbly conceals what sounds like a guitar part from Sly & the Family Stone's "Family Affair" among the funk fragments, while "1976" is intriguing quasi-European disco. But just when you think you've got this hip-hop chameleon's number, he hits you with "Through the Walls," its spaced-out vocal placed, karaoke-like, in a power-pop setting. With SINCE WE LAST SPOKE, RJD2 continues to redefine the role of DJ as solo performer.Spin (p.63) - Ranked #38 in Spin's "40 Best Albums of the Year" - "[T]his is Wilco at their most organic and instinctual..."
Entertainment Weekly (pp.84-5) - "[RJ] lets his softer side show to touching effect....RJD2's awkward, unaffected vocals lend the hype some heart."-Grade: A-
Q (p.105) - 4 stars out of 5 - "[M]oulding Barry White, Buck Rogers's technicolour synths, Funkadelic, '70s cop show samples and glitchy Warp electronics to scratchy blues and soul vocal samples soon reaps stunning results....The bar is raised."
Uncut (p.86) - 3 stars out of 5 - "RJD2 ranges across Latino jazz, stadium rock and pastoral glitch....A cool, well-timed curveball."