The California rapper skirts the obvious path on a sprawling, kaleidoscopic album that occasionally loses its way.
If there is one trait to remember about Mykki Blanco’s music—and the man himself asserts as much—it’s that the queer rapper cannot be reduced to a single sonic identity. Now in his forties, the California-born artist with a prolific discography has even made this very characteristic the beating heart of his new album, Café Paradiso, which reclaims the wandering, colorful energy of Giuseppe Tornatore’s film Cinema Paradiso (1988) — minus the priest’s censorship.
Explicitly sexual (Fuck As Friends, NYC Dogs, Butt Sex…), this new batch of tracks, which loses itself less in languor than in length, tracks the pace of the artist’s cosmopolitan, nocturnal misadventures. If the epicenter of Café Paradiso lies in New York (the Strokes-esque Cut Me Open, the dance-punk Easy Does It, the nods to Suicide on NYC Dogs), a city he fled at sixteen, Mykki’s flâneur temperament guides us through his wanderings in Western Paris and the aisles of Tangier.
A Heady Intoxication
While solitude does appear at times (chosen or not), rarely has a Mykki Blanco record embodied his hunger for experimentation and sharing as fully. If we had already seen him alongside Yves Tumor for the collaborative project C-ORE, Café Paradiso and its parade of guests bring forth a genuine group (the centerpiece Foxes) of which he would serve as the master of ceremonies.
Completely and deliberately disjointed, the album draws a distinct energy from spotlighting singers and musicians to accompany him in reimaginings of Americana, surf rock, Estelle’s American Boy, and 1980s R&B.
If you play along with the string of vignettes (mimicking a live performance) offered by this newly formed group, the unbroken current of Café Paradiso yields a heady intoxication, as if swept up in the hallucinatory swirls of an endless party. Sufficient to forgive a few excesses when he pushes too hard.
Café Paradiso (Transgressive Records/Fuga). Out on September 4th.
