The other day I was having a drink at the coffee spot near my house and my boy Philly, who runs the place, asked me if I liked Joe Beats. At first, my memory didn’t serve me well enough to remember how much I’d liked Non-Prophets, which Beats produced for Sage Francis to lay some verbals down on. Philly came at me with, “It’s hip hop, instrumental stuff, kinda Pete Rock style.” My initial  mental reaction was like, “Seriously? Pete Rock? That’s either a very good thing or Philly is losin' his shit!” Philly handed me the disc and I promptly trotted home and dumped it into my computer and iPizzle. I was not disappointed, though I don’t think Philly was totally on point with his description, other than the fact that it’s an album full of dope instrumental hip hop tracks made in a similar style to Pete, but with a different end product.

Diverse Recourse pumps madly from track to track with seamless transitions, creating, actually, a sort of mixtape feel to what is an all original works album. The tempo and energy are constantly up, taking me back to the kind of hip hop production I loved most in the early 90s. In fact, I gotta quote the People Under the Stairs to proficiently describe what I’m getting at. “It’s that 2003 hip hop with that ’93 sound made with the ’73 Funk!” It is, on the surface, quite straight up, no frills hip hop; you have your breakbeat looped, with a funky bassline and some melodic samples over the top with the occasional slash-and-burn turntable cut-ups of vocal samples or movie dialogue.

Many of the breakbeats are familiar to the trained ear of a seasoned hip hop listener: a break used by De La Soul here, a Pharcyde beat there. However, Beats does a great job of seeking out and utilizing some new break material. No example shines brighter than on “Hellfire (Remix)”, where he loops a raging, snarling snare-rolling beat from “Steerage” by the Shipping News (off their debut album Save Everything). This beat charges ahead of bullet trains with ease (and may very well get me a speeding ticket!), regardless of its off-time cymbal crashes in certain measures (I know this because my buddy Bench, a drummer, knows this). All the while, Beats dices in perfectly a sample of the Cunninlynguists professing, “Hellfire can’t scorch me!!” The art survives the sliced bravado. “Hellfire” smoothly drops into a classical guitar loop that pushes you right into the next track, “Pour Me One,” and you’d almost miss the fact that you’re in a new song, except for the slight differences in recording levels. From “Pour Me One”, Beats allows a little space for a tripped out organ riff to pull you into “Big Eyed Son.” A beat that has so many peripheral tones to the snares that you could get lost in the possibilities. “The Buzz Off” has this magical, Ennio Morricone-esque horn riff that makes my roommate want to go to a bullfight and I couldn’t agree more, as the rumbling, gurgly bassline sounds like the nervous stomach of a Matador at his first bullfight.

One other thing that gets me so excited about this album has to do with a conversation I had recently with my boy Bench. We were talking about the obituary we should all be writing for hip hop. In the popular realm of radio play and club Rap, the art form, if you can call it that here, is as stale as the bread you get from dumpster-diving behind the neighborhood bakery. The beats are picayune and the lyrics are either completely moronic, basely violent, delinquently misogynistic, or all of the above (usually!). Let it be understood, this is coming from a die-hard lover of hip hop. Meanwhile, when it comes to the underground, many of the MCs aren’t very creative, at least compared to their predecessors of a decade ago. What is left of an unwanted meal is the beats… Bench and I agreed that instrumental hip hop seems to be the only part of the genre worth paying solid attention to anymore. Thankfully, Joe Beats agrees and crafts interesting beats, which make you dig in your memory banks for the samples, but can also make you nod your head like you did the first time you saw Company Flow in 1997.

-Gabriel Bogart