Broke With Expensive Taste
Azealia Banks
60:19 min • Prospect Park • November 6, 2014
John Preston reviews
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At the very least the dramatic and unexpected release of Azealia Banks’ debut album is a relief. Her one bona fide hit, the filthy and fantastic ‘212’, was released in 2011 and talk of her first album, mainly by Banks herself, has been on, off and on again pretty much consistently since then. Some 3 years later and Beyoncéd onto iTunes at 7.00pm on a cold Thursday in early November Broke With Expensive Taste finally saw the light of day. We can all now move on; Banks, the naysayers, the many she was horrified with brattish abuse via her volatile twitter account – let’s go and fix our glare on the new kid. Maybe the surprise then is that there is a lot more to Azealia Banks than being a big dirty mouthed one-hit wonder. The breadth and rush of the consistently surprising, eccentric but accessible tracks here is absolute proof that she knew what she was doing all along.
One of the most interesting and revealing aspects of Azealia Banks first full length release is all of the things that it is not. There is no EDM although this is most definitely a dance record, no dubstep, no grand-standing features and no sign of the kind of producers that eclipse the artist themselves and are usually called in for last minute emergencies. In fact the one track that was produced by and featured the ubiquitous Pharrell Williams (the lacklustre and generic ‘ATM Jam’) has wisely been left off. The Williams collaboration was forced upon Banks by her then record company (she has since left Interscope, to call it a rocky relationship would appear an understatement) to bag an easy hit as is often the case and by all accounts represents the reasons why Broke With Expensive Taste has suffered such a long and bumpy ride to release. Banks is not an artist who is not willing to comprise or curtail her artistic impulses and this is made abundantly clear here.
Album opener ‘Idle Delilah’ has clattering pots and pans percussion, a fuzz-box island guitar riff and a chorus, if it can indeed be called that, that consists only of a chopped-to-utter-smithereens Brandy sample from her hit ‘I Wanna Be Down’ which is rendered utterly unrecognisable here. This is to support Banks warbling but radiant rap and vocal lines laid out over a building house beat. ‘Desperado’ and ‘Gimme a Chance’ go down different roads entirely. The former has Banks speeding sulkily over an old and moody MJ Cole 2-step track ‘Bandelero Desperado’ with muted trumpet and an unmistakeable British identity whilst ‘Gimme A Chance’ references early hip hop scratching and a Ze Records ‘Off the Coast of Me’ dead – eyed and sung chorus. This all comes before the second half of the track which explodes into Latin American horns with Banks both singing and rapping in Spanish. ‘JFK’ is a snooker balls-cracking house track with vocal inflections mimicking an almost operatic narrative of the vogue balls and creative rivalry and’ Wallace’ has dark cavernous drums, a blink and you’ll miss it Missy Elliot reference and might be about a dog. At this point it is hard to accept that the album has not even reached its half-way point, such is the diversity and ambition that is alluded to.
The album’s middle section is its most conventional and traditionally urban, all of the tracks are rapped. ‘Ice Princess’ in particular, which is a variation on Morgan Page’s ‘In The Air’ hit, proves that Banks can more than hold her own in commercial rap; her rhymes are effortless and engaging, often surreal, with a flow that is sharp but soothing. ‘Soda’ is a popping, taut house track that sounds like little else coming out of the urban genre or any other stable at the moment and is completely sung in Banks highly distinctive swooping – and occasionally flat – baritone. It introduces the last act of the album and at this point some of the admittedly unexpected flow of the first half does suffer, due mainly to ‘Nude Beach a Go-Go’. Produced by Ariel Pink with an intense love or loathe quality, it sounds like a Beach Boys carol about the joys of nude beaches (‘Do you jingle when you dingle-dangle? Everybody does the bingle-bangle’) as imagined by the B 52s who already have a song called ‘Theme for A Nude Beach’. It is quite a lot to take in and is probably brilliant but is jarringly sandwiched between the album’s deepest house tracks, the alluring triptych of ‘Luxury’, ‘Miss Camaraderie’ and ‘Miss Amour’.
The decision to include older tracks here, including ones already featured in Banks 2012 Fantasia mixtape (and yes, ‘212’ is also here), is the only misstep that hinders Broke With Expensive Taste’s’ irresistible freshness. Not only are they the weaker tracks in the majority but they overload the track listing to 16 and subsequently dilute the potential power of the lesser heard and superior material. The real surprise here though is that Azealia Banks could not get this album released in the first place, this is the stuff that classic debut albums are made and is massive indictment of the state of the music industry in 2014. An unreserved success still, with Broke With Expensive Taste Azealia Banks has ably demonstrated that the fight was most definitely worth it and has emerged out of the other side as an important, original and necessary artist.
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