The new Bosco Delrey’s album ‘Everybody Wah’ sounds, at the same time, like something I have never heard, and many things I have heard; it sounds foreign and familiar, eclectic but nevertheless personal. I am realizing it is very difficult to write about this multi-influenced music, that seems to be an unique combination of 60s infused-garage-rock and a new sort of electronic distortion, with this foot-tapping confident tempo all along the album.
Bosco Delrey’s mosaic-like music world, with guitars and synths sealed with electronics and heavy beats, has such a slick delivery you want to mention the greatest names, as if Elvis was walking under Beck’s shadow,… Beck because of the all-embracing style, the easy versatility and the imaginative combinations, and Elvis Presley,… well I am not the one who said it, Diplo, whose label Mad Decent is releasing Delrey’s album, described him as ‘a sort of garbage can Elvis from New Jersey’. But I can totally understand it when I listen to the doo-wop ‘Insta Love’ sung with a seductive low voice, or to ‘Don Haps’, driven by that dry guitar rockabilly riff all along, but turning into something much more complex and powerful at each second, producing a brand new sound of distortion and grandiosity.
Vintage-meets-modernity ‘Baby's Got A Blue Flame’ opens the album with an energy and an optimism guaranteed to grab your attention, whereas the determined and light gallop of ‘Get Outta Dodge’ cultivates this catchy upbeat melody theme, that will keep surprising you with a spiraling synth and pleasant weirdness.
The whole album has this same drive, bouncing in its unruliness, so difficult to pigeon hole, going from the roaring and rumbling ‘All Are Souls The Same’ and its not-quite-completely-Indian heavy dancing beats mixed with symphonic layers, to the jamming electric organ and infectious vintage groove of ‘Glow Go The Bones’, to a totally new animal like ‘Archebold Ivy’ full of these high-pitched titillating electronic-synth riffs hardly covering these violent synchronized drumbeats-vocals, to even the violent ‘Cool Out’ as crazy as a Daniel Johnston’s song, without the real madness.
The rhythms slow down a little with the reggae-ish-sun-drenched ‘Explelled Spelled Expelled’, or with ‘Down We Go’, which sounds like a vacation in some exotic and warm island, or with the more intimate ‘Afterlife’, softly running after some white light, like some lost track of ‘Guero’.
This patchwork album closes with ‘20 Flight Dub’, a spacey song run all over by a galloping hard beat and a fluid ambiance that may seem an out-of-place track at the first impression, but the album diversity is so vast that after this long journey it is like going back to a safer and quieter place.
‘Everybody Wah’ was recorded in Memphis, Tennessee and Brooklyn, and I still don’t know what it sounds like, actually I challenge anybody to say what it sounds like.