Reticently, a temptation-laden rhythm begins to unfold in the opening bars of “Boom – Remastered” that will only feel more pressurized and enticing as we listen on. There’s a richness to the melody the instrumentation creates, but it’s balanced out with a black and white percussive groove that seems rather beholden to noise pop aesthetics for how heavy an R&B overtone we hear in the ensuing lead vocal. These elements appear to us in a cleaner fashion in “Boom – Love Version,” but no matter where they turn up in HeIsTheArtist’s Adam & Eve, they never feel like the product of plasticity and corporate greed – a far stretch from what one might acquire in some of the chart-topping EPs currently out this month.
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The third version of “Boom” included in Adam & Eve – “Boom – The Explosion” – borrows some of the raw abrasiveness of the remastered cut and purposes it with more of a hip-hop aesthetic than anything in the straight pop world, but in the end, it produces the most streamlined and cosmopolitan performance in this tracklist. Some might question why HeIsTheArtist felt the need to put three different mixes of a single song onto the same extended play, but for me, it makes perfect sense. His mission here has more to do with exhibitionism than it does appeasing the needs of some A&R department, and relative to what the big-budget contenders in pop music are doing right now, he deserves a lot of credit for his organic approach.
“High Fashion” swiftly swings from the darkness and cuts us with its righteous melodic rap. HeIsTheArtist brilliantly manages the verses in this track, giving Roddy Ricch and Mustard a run for their money in some ways, and colorizes the words with a modulated harmony that seems to reflect all of the unspoken emotion in the song beautifully. A mashup of “Sometimes” and “I Want You Around” brings some acoustic guitar play into the mix for a bonfire-style beat I definitely didn’t plan on hearing when I listened to “Boom” just ten minutes earlier, but all the same, found very welcoming and warm indeed. Adam & Eve as a concept piece is a lot of things, but one thing it definitely isn’t is predictable in any way, shape or form.
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HeIsTheArtist’s third official extended play comes to an end with a cover of Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You” that, while being a big down-tuned from its original incarnation, brings us full-circle to where we first began with “Boom – Remastered” in a way that I can’t picture any other song pulling off. The strings carry the music off into the silence from which it first came ripping, and though the star of this track is the vocal, it feels a lot folkier in spirit because of its acoustic stylization of the melody. I wasn’t sure what I would hear in an EP broken into two halves – one original mixes, the other a brief collection of covers – but with HeIsTheArtist at the helm, my listening experience was absolutely epic. He’s onto something good here, and I won’t be the only critic to say so.
Garth Thomas