June 8, 2018 - XL Recordings
Everyone’s favorite Stockholm maverick Baba Stiltz is back with a big heavy EP dropped on a big heavy label. Showtime on XL Recordings is definitely a significant career opportunity for Stiltz. But after listening to it, I can’t decide if he is mocking his own luck or just not trying hard enough. The intentionally unrefined ideas in the first two tracks almost don’t hold my attention long enough to get to the last two tracks, which are the EP’s best and most shining stars.
Baba Stiltz’s career is built on an attractive collection of chewed up and spit out music culture. He feeds his audience like a caring mama bird. He is tongue-in-cheek with a smart sensibility usually only found in art school. His music is thoughtful and droll. But the Showtime EP comes off as though it were hastily and arbitrarily pasted together with less consideration than previous work. The first track ‘Showtime’ starts things off with a reckless approach to making light. The words satirize the casual and conversational lyrics of hip hop songwriting over a standard rhythmic pattern of beats. Stiltz randomly stops the track as though it is a skipping CD-ROM, evoking the frustration of driving across the country in the family’s old truck with a bad sound system, or sneaking forbidden songs on the church’s old communal CD-player from the media closet. It’s a strategy which leaves the listener without question of Stiltz’s intention, but the end result falls flat. There is not enough intrigue to the song as a concept.
The second song ‘Situation’ grapples with the same issues inflating as the first. It’s a little easier to stomach, but it’s still flat root beer. The flavor changes completely, however, with the third track ‘Serve.’ Stiltz abstracts his voice with a vocoder or digital auto-tune, which simultaneously references modern hip hop, nineties trance music, and modern hip hop referencing nineties trance music referencing older hip hop. Plus, the beat and underthings are simply sparkling with his signature amblings. This sound is a return to the Baba Stiltz we fell in love with, and, appropriately, it serves as a perfect introduction to the fourth and final track, ‘Maze.’ ‘Maze’ is amazing. It fuses the casual lyrical poetry of the first two songs with the digitally altered vocals of the third song and the brilliant playfulness of Stiltz’s song composition. ‘Maze’ realizes all the ideas present in rest of the EP and wraps them in an attractive, sensual package of tender crooning and silly sounds. We again begin to float, becoming suspended between believing and not believing Stiltz as he sings about his muse. That space between belief and disbelief is where Baba Stiltz’s songs become works of high art.
A maker makes and an artist edits. I think Showtime would have been stronger as a unit without the first two songs. At the very least, the first two songs should have been reduced to the extra tracks that come on the b-side and function as one-dimensional punchlines. Since Baba Stiltz did not edit for us, we’ll treat Showtime as a flower and pluck away the petals that don’t serve. ☔