Reviews: The Gentry and Serge Severe

[November 26th, 2008]

The Gentry Sex by the Unit

(In Music We Trust)
Sex sells. And Hillsboro’s the Gentry takes that adage literally on its second album, Sex by the Unit. Driven by a New Waver’s sensibility for electronic hooks and spiked with ragged guitar licks covered in grime and Pop Rocks, the quartet’s latest packs a wallop into its seven-song, 28-minute disc.

Sex is an overriding theme, as evidenced by the disc’s sparse, shiny condom-wrapper packaging. Sex as commodity and impulse is addressed with kinky sadism on “Awkwardness!,” as singer Gino Mari croons skeezily about fucking in public restrooms over orgasmic, panting rhythms. It’s one of several tracks bridging the gap between tantra and the Chuck Palahniuk generation.

The band also understands the addictive quality of overconsumption of the fleshy variety, as evidenced by the muddy but poppier “Shakes,” which shows the Gentry’s harmonic side. Through a catchy, electronica-laced hook, Mari croons sensually about his lady’s reliance on kink, reiterating that “She gets the shakes from me” to indicate her reliance on his specific brand of Sugar-Daddery.

But sex isn’t the only item for sale on the album, which drops on Black Friday. The Gentry bites the hand that feeds it on “Pulling an Elvis,” with its kinetic, futuristic beat dropping to a militaristic march while the band repeats “We are soldiers for pop culture,” skewering the industry and its slaves (that’d be us) like a bizarre vision of an MTV-fied Fourth Reich.

Ironically, in rallying against entertainment—wet and dry—as a bastardized possession, the Gentry has churned out a desirable commodity of its own. Just don’t tell the band. AP KRYZA.

Serge Severe Concrete Techniques

(Focused Noise Productions)
Back in the days when I was a teenager—before I had status and before I had a pager—you could find the abstract by listening to hip-hop. My pops used to say it reminded him of bebop. But one need not steal Q-Tip lyrics to notice that the bridge connecting hip-hop to America’s treasure trove of black music has been under construction as of late—largely replaced by constructions of the swingless German techno variety. So hearing Serge Severe’s Concrete Techniques, an album that evidences a deep-seated understanding of throwback funk and soul as well as hip-hop’s own formative years, is like finding an unexpected home-cooked meal on your kitchen table.

But it’s not just sentimentality that makes Concrete Techniques—Severe’s third or fourth album, depending on how you count ’em—the MC’s finest effort to date, it’s the way his singular flow interacts with the beats. His half-battle/half-conscious steez finds him skipping over every other beat, his delivery a smooth bounce reminiscent of both Guru’s laid-back wisdom-dropping and B Real of Cypress Hill’s verbal jabs. Serge’s vocal approach incorporates more modern influences as well, but all of them are filtered through our boy’s favorite pastimes, finding joy in strung-out wordplay on the title track (“Rock spots nonstop with an onslaught that’ll make the crowd move like it’s hopscotch/ Watch my pop lock top rock with a funky rhythm/ It’s just monkey business, chunky spittin’”) and getting down to brass tacks on “It’s On Mine” (“It’s the DIY. gotta do it yourself/ So just say bye-bye to the corporate help”).

But the big victory here is that one of Portland’s finest young MCs has been paired with one of its finest producers (DJ Universal Sect, who gives the album its marquee soulful sound). That symbiosis seems as much a nod to hip-hop’s golden era than any of the album’s stylistic choices. CASEY JARMAN.