Its hard to get a bead on exactly what Minneapolis-based Jeremy Nutzman is up to with Neon Brown, his second LP as Velvet Negroni, which is part of why its good. You could almost call its dreamy trap-soul new age if that didnt suggest a yin-yoga chill at odds with couplets like Dont fight your boy on the payphone/la la, I burst to flames like its Waco and Ultra fusion handsome dish/Feed them LSD like Im Charlie Manson, bitch. But Nutzmans been refining his freaky attack in increments since his decidedly post-Weeknd Pony Bwoy project and T.C.O.D., the 2017 Negroni debut. And on Neon Brown, hes hit on a balance of prettiness, weirdness and heart thats unkempt and captivating.
Nutzmans made some notable fans, including regional pointman Justin Vernon (hes credited on the new Bon Iver LP), his pal Kanye West, and Kevin Parker (who gave Velvet Negroni the opening slot at Tame Impalas recent Madison Square Garden gig). Nutzmans approach echoes them all in his taste for human-digital mashups, a sound shaped by his Twin Cities fellow travelers Simon Christensen (Psymun) and Elliott Kozel (Tickle Torture). Theyre comers, too: Psymun had a hand in Future and Juice WRLDs Fine China and Young Thugs Chanel, and has helped grow the local scene thats raised Dizzy Fae and current valedictorian Lizzo. Both producers come off as students of classic headfuck music. Confetti sounds held together by the skeleton of a King Tubby dub beat, ditto the drum collage on the touchingly emo Feel Let, and the ghostly keyboard stabs of Ectodub, with its brain-scrambling backwards backing vocals.
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Nutzman shows a similar taste for the disorienting, and his most gratuitously strange stuff is sometimes the most engaging. The reverberant acoustic beats on Nester suggest composer Harry Partchs science lab gamelan, with rhymes full of wiggy free-association, suggesting a guy who defaults to cracking wise or tripping out whenever the emotional stakes rise. But that tension makes it more than just empty stoner riffage, and Nutzmans rangey playfulness often leads him to great pop moments. Curiously, they often come at the end of songs. See the falsetto flourishes that cap Feel Let, or the kicker to Scratchers, when Nutzman chants yippi-ki-yo amidst a calliope whirl of synths and drum sputters, conjuring a country-western nonsense-phrase history that goes from Bing Crosbys Im An Old Cowhand (From The Rio Grande), to Sonny Rollins deconstruction of the same, to Bruce Willis Die Hard kiss-off. Its a brief, dazzling passage on a record with quite a few, and if dude could ultimately do more with them, theres enough here to make it worth the ride.