It seems that classics have not yet become obsolete, even in the digital age. Since the summer, everyone has been queuing up at the cinema to see The Odyssey, and on his fifth album, the British producer Romare features a complete Goethe poem recited in German. ‘Selige Sehnsucht’ contains the oft-quoted phrase ‘Stirb und werde!’ and the lines ‘I will praise that which is alive, / That longs for death by flame’. A hint of apocalypse shimmers through these words, spoken with a classically rolling ‘Rrr’, set to a subdued reggae-house riddim. And just as in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, Romare’s reinterpretation of the material in this new context takes on the air of a warning of impending destruction.
Some of the tracks on Oblivion have the feel of semi-instrumental R&B numbers, such as ‘The Need’ with its short vocal samples and flute solo in the middle section. Other tracks rely on a subtly gritty house sound with a dash of acid bubbling, such as ‘Change’. In general, the music sounds less like a collage than Romare’s earlier work, even though samples are used throughout, particularly as snippets of speech. Goethe, incidentally, is not the only ‘prince of poets’ Romare draws upon. In ‘Fearful Symmetry’, he uses passages from William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, accompanied by a gently creeping downtempo groove with a softly bouncing bassline. Not everything works equally well with this narrative approach; some references to club music occasionally seem rather arbitrary. But when it rocks, as in ‘Take Us’, it really rocks.
Oblivion
