R N G L D R | Life & Style Magazine

[FEATURED]

Refined in its Many Diasporic Styles-du-Jour, Juls’s Debut is a Vibrant Mosaic

Above all else, the album’s amalgamate auditory journey exists within the walls of a long night spent dancing at a club in Accra; an early morning emerging from a South London basement party where the DJ, like Juls – or maybe Juls himself – bleeds of a musical understanding that is especially wide-ranging. Tethered akin with a case study on West African rhythm, the highlife of beachy guitar strums tied to choral progressions, brassy, warm jazz infusions, and the ever-present sparkle of our protagonist’s signature tagline – Juls baby – Sounds of My World is a wide-ranging, yet tightly knit sonic display of everything it is that makes Juls such a productive gem.

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Leon Bridges Put Aside the Old School Pop-Soul and Dropped the Best R&B Moment of 2021

Out with the saloon piano, in with the playful key progressions. In with Terrace Martin and Robert Glasper, along with Nate Mercereau and Ricky Reed who oversee the album’s production at large. And with the legendary composer-producers, in, too, with the modernity of hip-hop basslines, jazzy composition, digitally perfected production, and subsequently, a new sound of Leon Bridges – something more stylistically aligned with Funk and Rhythm and Blues than influences from the earlier decades that his foundation was built upon. A modern sound for an artist whose defining charm was always needlessly sounding like he just thwarted forward through a time machine.

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Chuck Indigo’s Newest Project Explores Every Shade of his Stylistically Sweeping Sound

Through its twelve tracks, Shades Of Indigo first and foremost lives up to its name. A rainbowic exploration of all the color in Chuck’s expansive sound, the EP is one that should be handed to a listener when they first stumble across his ever-expanding soundscape. A one-of-a-kind vocal register that bleeds through the music whether he’s delivering his words rapped or sung; the ability to harken onto that register and deliver soulful bouts and hooks throughout; the knack – perhaps the sharpest tool in his bag – to envelope a listener’s attention with poetic, prophetic penmanship and immersive storytelling that outside of Nashville in the modern hip-hop cloth, is increasingly rare.

Why You Need To See Thundercat in Concert

Even amongst the almost entirely positive stream of emotion and connection that concerts have in our lives, there are generational acts that bring an even greater sense of awe than others. Of them, it would be hard to argue that in the modern touring circuit, any artist brings more gusto hand-in-hand with an atmosphere that can only really be described as positive, fun-loving, inviting, and enticing, than Los Angelino, Acid Jazz playwright, and Neo-Funk virtuoso with an 6-string bass, Thundercat.

Isaiah Rashad Live

Summit Music Hall | Denver, CO | Sep 25, 2021

Theo Croker | BLK2LIFE

BLK2LIFE || A FUTURE PAST – from its title to its timeless sound – at once beckons for a past, sources from the present, and defies the existence of time as it relates to the tenets of jazz altogether. It is, in that description, a jazz album by its most time-honored, yet time-defying tradition. It’s also just a damn good time. At moments exuding, without ever committing, to the cinematic depth and intensity that can come to define a jazz album’s identity, Theo Croker’s collection instead brims with the intimacy and the light-hearted playfulness of a live set.

Westword Music Showcase

Kaytranada, Duke Dumont, KDJ, Thundercat, Young the Giant, Matoma + more

Mission Ballroom, Denver | September 18, 2021

JMSN | Heals Me

Heals Me exists in substance as what it is that JMSN’s self-made stylistic scope, suspended in artistry by slappy basslines and juxtaposed falsettos through a sort of spinning Neo-Soul spectrum reaching both back in time and setting an untouchable precedent for the future, means to his personal sensitivities. It is a culminative marriage between the man and the artist – an uncalculated expression of truths that define his duality.

Get To Know | HXRY

HXRY grew up listening to his mother play records from Mary J. Blige, The Isley Brothers, and a whole lot of disco. He grew up to his dad supplying the rock, blues, and hip-hop. “But, it wasn’t until [he] started linking with other producers on SoundCloud who had super electronic backgrounds that inspired [him] to keep experimenting,” he told us in 2020 in an effort to delineate to some extent the incalculably wide-ranging sound that he boasts today.

Deep Tropics Nashville | A Recap

Beyond the party busses humming and the chaotic human low points reached every minute by another lost soul on the stretch of Lower Broadway, everyone truly standing up for Nashville – really working in and representing the city – and its surrounding webs of townships and neighborhoods, is seemingly an artist or involved in the artsy undergrounds to some extent, working on one or two extracurricular explorations of their passion, be it musical, visual, stylistic, photographical, or otherwise. Nashville’s creative scene is deeper than you may think – deeper than we once knew. It’s legitimate and growing and locally sourced. And during the Summertime, there is no better display of it all than the spectrum of the Deep Tropics Music Festival.

Nashville’s Hip-Hop Scene Shows Out at Deep Tropics Festival

If the energy in orbit around Deep Tropics’ minimalistic secondary stage called Congo – tucked into a corner of the grounds, sparsely decorated with tropical houseplants, and accidentally cut with bear-trapping holes – is a sign of things to come, Nashville’s hip-hop scene is a powerful force just beginning to peak its wide-ranging glimpse out from the underground, with its eyes set on the top.

Deep Tropics | Nashville

Photo galleries from the festival

HXRY's Debut Album | 'Reflections'

“A long ass year of figuring out who the fuck I was. Thank you for listening to my story. It means so much to me to have this out and to close this chapter of my life..."

A Live Photo Editorial of Chicago R&B Artist, HXRY

'Reflections' Release Party | Chicago, Illinois | August 23, 2021

McClenney | On A Virgo Mind

What On A Virgo Mind is can be spoken about in terms of its inadherence to the traditional boundaries of style or genre hand-in-hand with a consistent adherence to emotional tranquility and overarching sense of calm. The project – true to its title – breathes of the placated assumptions that the zodiac generation makes of Virgos like the Maryland transcendentalist. Humble, natural, kind, sympathetic, the emotion rings true through the album’s calming, meditative, and introspective half-hour.

JMSN + Alexa Demie | ‘Love 2 U’

Take a little bad boy glam, add a string of falsetto perfection, blend it into a filmic nonreality, cut jet black with neon color, and stamp it with the exclamation point of a panty-dropping, face-melting guitar solo. In that artistic space, JMSN’s cinematographic marathon, Love 2 U, beams. Like a James Bond intro merging with the Neo-Noir holographic lust of Blade Runner under a cinematic banner where the timelessness of Soul music soundtracks all, his new visuals – directed by girlfriend, actress, and apparent visionary mogul Alexa Demie – are an undertaking of daunting proportions and a vibrant creative achievement.

[SERIES]

[NEW & NOW]

A Series & Playlist Dedicated to the In-Depth Exploration of Black Music's Most Significant Statements

A Hypotheical Exploration of Collaborations We Want to See in Music

Bullet Pointing Why Our Favorite Artists are also Some of the World's Most Stylish Figues.

Reflections on our Best Concert Experiences

Reviews & Reactions to some of Music's Most Important Works

An Exploration of our Favorite Footwear.

Narratives Culminating in the Ultimate Live Show

Conversations with some of the World's Most Interesting Artists

Two of Our Writers Pen their Organic Responses to Album Releases

MUSIC

The Legacy of Zion I's Steve 'Zumbi' Gaines who Passed at Age 49

From the very beginning, the hyper-lyrical, consciously rooted raps of front man, Steve ‘Zumbi’ Gaines danced across the framework of electronically nuanced beats from DJ and producer, Amp Live. Undisputedly ahead of their time when it came to infusing a signature sound with cyber-punk keystrokes that left a listener suspended sans gravity in a futurist sonic space, Zumbi’s raps acted as a balancing act, carrying more than enough gravity to bring a listener not only back to Earth, but into their own mind....

[Full Story]

Pink Siifu Utilizes All the Spice in the Cabinet for Artsy, Wild 'GUMBO'!'

[Review]

The Legacy of PivotGang's squeakPIVOT

[Editorial]

It’s a New Zodiac for R&B with a Golden Era Twist | Phabo’s ‘Soulquarius’ Debut

[Review]

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'The House Is Burning' and from its Ashes, Hip-Hop Feels New

[Review]

[More Music]

[MUSIC SPOTLIGHT]

[More New Music]

Listen

Gold-Diggers Sound

Leon Bridges

Listen

Shades of Indigo

Chuck Indigo

Listen

BLK2LIFE

Thro Croker

STYLE

An Interview with 20-Year-Old Philanthropic Stylist, Chi Ilochi

Age is only a number, and for 20-year-old Nigerian-American fashion stylist, Chi Ilochi, other number mean much more. The number of opportunities she makes for herself to teach people self-expression through fashion; the number of individuals with disabilities that she has styled; the number of underrepresented communities that she aims to lift up through fashion. Chi truly is the fusion of fashion and philanthropy.

'I like for my work to be timeless, and also cater to my client’s personal interests and personality.'

[Interview]