Signature Ratings
0- What the hell
1- Borrow don't buy
2- Well...a couple of joints
3- Worth a listen
4- Off the hook
5- Buy it or die
The StayFree Movement - Fudakochi
By: Melody Charles
It may not seem like it after you read this, but I'm not a reviewer who enjoys bashing folks---like Dallasite Erykah Badu so famously said about artists, "I'm sensitive about my s***," so I do my best to give musicians the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, not even my most generous largesse helped me while listening to The Stayfree Movement. Fudakochi (pronounced Fu-da- CO-chi) appears to be a pensive brother with grandiose ideals about love, self and society, so I was encouraged to see self-composed
titled and interludes titles that spoke to more than his bedroom skills.
Alas, that anticipation evaporated when I sat through one muddled and misdirected track after another. First off, many of the songs are poorly mixed; next to no treble, very little bottom, so both the messages and the music sound stifled. The rhythm appears to be off, for example, in "Stayfree," as if they recorded the vocals first and then tried to combine them with a track playing at a slower tempo. "God Did You Forget About Us?" features pertinent (if a little dated) civil rights sound bites, but the power of the message is diluted by the tepid delivery.
In fact, if there were one glaring fault with this CD, besides its inability to be played in my laptop...wth, it's Fudakochi's transparent, nasal voice; it deflates any conviction from his lyrics/prose and makes Chris Brown sound like Will Downing. I'm serious. Nails raking across a chalkboard have less dissonance than his vocals on "Get By." His repeated attempts at depth come off as shallow and pretentious, especially on the heavy-handed intro, "Keep Going," and "Aquarius Love" sounds like it was recorded in a bathroom with a micro-cassette recorder and battery-operated keyboard.....from Fisher-Price.
Let me stop; Fudakochi does appear to have talent and potential, since he wrote and played the keyboards as well as vocalized, but it will take more than this amateurish effort to prove it. To prove I'm in your corner Brother, I'll spot you these pointers for the next go-round; don't let your play-cousin mix or supply the beats if he's not qualified (watching BET/VH1/TV One doesn't count), and second, save interludes for the MIDDLE of the CD, unless you've got Usher or Rihanna singing the hook. Last, but certainly not least, use half of the ingenuity and focus that you applied to your CD design/photography to make sure that the CD plays in hard drives---it's 2008, not 1998. Once you upgrade the quality all the way around, you'll get there. But if this is the vehicle you intend to use, Fudakochi, it's running on fumes and needs desperately to be recalled.
1 Signature
TOP
MORE REVIEWS
