RJD2: Dame Fortune Review

By Connor Schwanke
Music Reviewer

Artist: RJD2
Album: Dame Fortune
Label: RJ Electrical Connections
Release Date: March 24, 2016
Website: http://rjd2.net/

Probable time traveller Ramble Jon Krohn, under the stage name RJD2, has continually churned out some of the best underrated music throughout the 13 years after his debut release, Deadringer. Although RJD2’s music maintains a major matter of wizardry, fans of his music can never predict how his music will punch them around upon listening. So far, the best way to come to know RJD2’s beat­-making likelihood is to assume he is a native of Mars that loves to listen to Sinatra or Tower of Power on vinyl and upon his relocation to Earth, Derek Vincent Smith of Pretty Lights was the first person he met. Dame Fortune spends some time demanding his veteran stature by jamming on his home sound, but then delivers his new sonics of the album cycle by pushing into a more aggressive scape as the album progresses.

Dame Fortune sets off around a pulsating bass-line that tends to imagine a calmly biting astronomical scene. Following with some of the funkiest orchestration of the album, RJD2 settles into his Philly-­soul riffs. From there, he begins Dame Fortune’s auricular statement. By the fifth track, appropriately titled “A New Theory,” starts chopping up dialogue samples against a texture­-flipping noise-­rock cutting board that would make HEALTH smile. Then the slammed, roomy drum production that was employed in “More Is Than Isn’t” returns under in a feature of “Son Little,” and under that memory, frequent collaborator Phonte Coleman joins in for another song. The next instrumental blooms into an absolute furor, and the dynamic chaos stays for a collaboration with rapper Blueprint. Dame Fortune then gives one more demonstration of RJD2’s funk-­hop style before entering and ending in the astronomical phase.

Dame Fortune is a certain love triangle between funk, hip­-hop and electronica and the transition between them is so fluid that any fan of one of the genres could be crossed over into one another. RJD2 has such tasteful and extensive musical chops that we are entering the 14th year and he still has done no wrong.