In today’s age, technology has flooded our lives with content. Caught in the mire are modern musicians who champion an art form that’s more widely distributed than any other throughout human history. And we, more often than not, overlook the music created by unfamiliar faces because it’s challenging. We’d rather have an easy listen, a known quantity to skim through while we think about something else.
Hearing is easy, but listening is difficult. Welcome to “Why We Like It”, where we rebuke the trends in favor of thoughtful analysis and underknown sounds.
“Right One” Ft. Daisy Vorakhanh — Lebbs
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How We Found It
From Portsmouth, England to our SubmitHub inbox, “Right One” stole my attention and captivated my ear for smooth jazzy hip hop and existential pondering. Emcee and producer Lebbs teams up with the stylish and elegant Daisy Vorakhanh for a track that steals you away and asks you to reflect inward all at once.
Why We Like It
“Right One” is a full package with a commanding aesthetic. From the gentle scratch of white noise that gives a vintage texture to the lo-fi production to the grayscale tones and choice of threads, Lebbs and Daisy Vorakhanh create an ethereal musical experience that consumes the moment it exists in.
“Dig into your soul, tell me how it feels,” Daisy starts off the track. The words alone are piercing, but Daisy makes the vulnerable request inviting. She sings with a warmth that instills matriarchal confidence that the embrace of her words will guard the psychonaut against the demons of their introspection. The request to “dig” implies the hard labor of unearthing a truth left buried. It’s Lebbs who answers her call to uncover that self-reflection.
“I sip whatever with a cynical intent / weathering my liver and obliterate the rest,” he answers in the second verse. “Still envisioning a gem, a scripture in a sense / the hypocrite’s pretentious shoulda written this to vent.” Lebbs layers his rhymes in a monotone cadence that reinforces the difficulty of voicing some of those hard truths easier left buried. But conjuring those demons under the sheltering hypnosis of Daisy’s spell leaves them corporeal enough to be expelled. He raps: “hope to change, something been holding me on these lonely days / clouds of smoke powdered nose as my soul decays.” The rhymes stream out of the poet as he digs ever deeper into his sense of being.
The real strength of “Right One” doesn’t fall on either Daisy or Lebbs but in their seamless aesthetic. Daisy’s warm hooks absorb the attention in a way that snaps you into the revealing poetics of Lebb’s contemplation. As he pulls apart the details of his spiritual health, everything but the resonance of snares and vibration of strings fades away until Daisy returns to weave the hook between his verses. Lebbs leaves me wanting more Daisy, and Daisy leaves me wanting more Lebbs. When the spell is over, I’m left wondering how my own soul feels and what truths have been buried by a fear of discovering them.
From Lebbs
I think the soul is just one big bundle of experiences that we use to identify ourselves. Like in the hook, Daisy asks how it feels and in the verse, I go on to explain ‘clouds of smoke, powdered nose as my soul decays.’ Basically, I just wanted to express where my soul was at this point in my life and how it was being affected by my — mostly bad — choices.” – Lebbs for CentralSauce
More From Lebbs
For more Lebbs, check out PROSPECTS — his duo effort with label-mate Apps. While “Right One” is the first single of his budding solo career, Lebbs assured me that the track won’t be the end of his collaboration with Dasiy Vorakhanh. Sign up for updates on Lebbs’ label website to be sure you don’t miss out on future releases and follow Daisy on Twitter.
More to Discover
Subscribe to the CentralSauce mailing list so you never miss out on the freshest sauce. Check out this continuously updated playlist of songs Brandon has added to our Discovery section! Each track or artist has been featured in our “Why We Like It” section, so be sure to check out the page here on the site.
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