Review: Shwayze – Let It Beat

November 4th, 2009 by Oswald Hobbes / Comment on this post

Let It Beat, the second album from Malibu-bred rapper Shwayze, begins with a track that features, in no particular order: a bouncy, rubbery beat, a gang of sprightly horns, a guest appearance by Snoop Dogg, and a lyrical shout-out to Shwayze’s past gig “serving lattes all day in [his] Chucks.” If that sounds like something you’d like, you should probably give Let It Beat a few spins.

Following last year’s sleeper of a self-titled debut, Let It Beat offers a pleasant melange of familiar sounds that works more often than it does not, although my endorsement comes with a big caveat lector: there is very little new to be discovered here. Let It Beat will work as background music for your next rager, but spending serious time with it one-on-one might elevate certain flaws in the record’s sound from “slightly irritating” to “intolerable.” (And when I say “certain flaws,” I’m referring mainly to producer/sidekick Cisco Adler’s annoying tendency to ruin otherwise passable party jams by singing exactly like deceased Sublime frontman Bradley Nowell.)

But: Shwayze’s sophomore effort has many fine qualities, not the least of which is the rapper’s causal flow and propensity for gently amusing one-liners. The guy’s not exactly gonna knock Jay-Z from his throne, but for a disc that you could file, ostensibly, under “rap-rock,” the rap portion is actually pretty savory. Shwayze comfortably rides the line between, say, Nelly and Common – this is a party

record with some backpacker inflections, most notably the closing cut “Heart & Soul,” which spends five whole minutes chastising LA girls for lacking moral turpitude over twinkling piano from none other than the E Street’s own Roy Bittan. (No, seriously. Roy Bittan is on this record. So is Ric Ocasek.)

With the exception of that one song, however, most of these tunes encourage exactly that type of behavior – Shwayze wants you to meet him in the bathroom, he makes clear throughout the record, when he isn’t whimsically lamenting the vagaries of romantic relationships. “Get U Home” is the first single, and it’s a high-energy funk jam with a beat that almost sounds like PlaySkool Neptunes (and that’s not a complaint); “Wait All Night” is skeletal and super cool, until a stray guitar line wanders in and kinda kills the vibe. That’s a consistent problem throughout, you might find – anytime the rap side of the equation wins out, the result is frisky and fun, a welcome change of pace from the majority of urban music clogging up radio playlists. But on tracks like “Crazy For You,” “Daze Like This,” and “Perfect For Me,” all the coked up blips and bleeps are replaced with generic guitar-strumming and bland melodies purloined straight from 1996′s worst fake-reggae songs.

Which is not necessarily a dis, because Let It Beat isn’t aimed at rock fans. Adler has just mixed in surface rock elements that hip-hop fans can easily recognize and digest. So my opinion here shouldn’t necessarily sway you if rock isn’t your cup of tea – there’s just enough organic instrumentation here to officially set Shwayze’s sound apart, but not enough to distract from the real reason you came in the first place. In other words, you won’t confuse this with anything from Anticon or Definitive Jux – this is major label rap rock, and most of the time that means sounding like Sugar Ray (or, as on the horrific “Maneatrr,” some unholy alliance of Linkin Park and Lady Gaga.)

But, hey, a lot of people like Sugar Ray. And a lot of people will probably enjoy this. I did, and I don’t mean to sound like I didn’t. At least half the tracks here will get regular rotation on my Scrabble playlists because they’re the kind of easy, non-threatening music that’s conducive to focusing almost entirely on something else. Let It Beat is fun and melodic and oftentimes pretty cool; I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to hang out with these guys. But is it going to change your life or challenge you in any way? Probably not.