The primary sound you listen on Benjamin Lyman’s debut album as 1010Benja, Ten Overall, is both a throat clearing or a deadpan chortle, a press release or a provocation. A symphony of programmed horns and strings is available in and Benja starts barking and cooing, sheeshing and coughing, shouting ad-libs—“Good day, guy! Good day!”—and unleashing a string of easy vocal runs. A gunshot pops; an engine revs. Then sirens and bit-crushed battlefield FX swallow the tune, leaving not anything however shrapnel. Playful, unusual, and unusually transferring, it’s the easiest advent to Benja’s oddball brilliance: a world-weary optimist and DIY maximalist with a sinewy, astonishing voice intended for the mainstream but made for the arthouse.
Ten Overall delivers on years of anticipation and promise for a transcendent skill who’s remained most commonly nameless because the get started of his profession. When Pitchfork referred to as the Kansas Town singer and manufacturer “one in all 2018’s maximum promising artists,” he’d handiest put out 3 songs. His first EP, Two Properties, launched at the heels of this acclaim, advised a burgeoning celebrity at the cusp of his perfect paintings. However as temporarily as Benja gave the impression, he vanished. He’s dropped a couple of singles in recent times, however the preliminary hype, faintly redolent of Space of Balloons-era the Weeknd and Nostalgia, Extremely-era Frank Ocean, has all however dissipated. It’s simple to conclude that the 34-year-old Benja overlooked his second.
If Ten Overall proves anything else, it’s that Benja’s simply positive occupying his personal self-defined stratosphere. Regardless that his sound has a number of precedents—his voice a supercharged hybrid of Jeremih and Justin Timberlake, his rangy manufacturing pulling from ’90s Björk and early 2010s Kanye—it’s unmistakably his, distinctive in its agglomeration. One second he’s rapping with kinetic ease over a slippery Acid Rap-type beat (“Peacekeeper”), the following he’s belting a glamorous hook over horns and strings and clattering cymbals (“H2HAVEYOU”). Ten Overall glides between neo-soul, alt-R&B, drill, gospel, lure, and radio-ready pop whilst Benja obliquely circles a suite of core topics: love and redemption, gratitude and religion, loss and deliverance.
His voice, pliable and exact, lets in him to flit without difficulty between moods and kinds. “Peacekeeper” and “Penta,” as an example, are skeletal freestyles whose nonchalance provides them a curious gravitas. Within the former, he balances humor with knowledge, speeding off traces about “trusting hoes,” observing Superstar Trek, and studying Alan Moore prior to triumphantly spitting, “I needed to pass get it, I couldn’t fold/I needed to stand up, I couldn’t learn.” On “Penta” he repeats a bar about feeling silly prior to groaning, scatting, and creating a noise that may handiest be described as a laugh. It’s invigorating, and humorous, to listen to Benja stretch his voice to its most unearthly depths, à l. a. Playboi Carti or Tom Waits. When the album’s extra tough songs materialize, like the nice and cozy electro-R&B strutter “Dual” or the searing ballad “Waterworks,” the breadth of his skill finds itself. Benja may just make a cleaner, easier pop or R&B album—he indisputably has the voice for it. As a substitute he dabbles with other paperwork and flows, enjoying with vivid hues and gummy textures to create his personal twisted sense of concord.
