‘Curious’ opens up with a melodic vocal section, one that rides along with the leading riff in unison, giving off twice the impact and making sure that succession of notes gets into your head early on. The riff alone continues throughout and the various vocal parts that appear offer a welcome bit of evolution and help keep things interesting. The melody used by the female vocal presents a really stylish, even vintage jazz kind of sound. This contrasts well with the leading rap vocal. The rap vocal has confidence and style and its a quick fire portrayal of short lines that again have significant impact due to the arrangement and their placement in between everything else.
On occasion the mix sounds a little noisy, but to be fair it’s an atmospheric kind of noise. The synths and riffs used have a similarly retro feel to the female vocal, which is actually quite refreshing to hear as it’s a sound not often utilised in modern music. That opening melody doesn’t appear notably again, so what you take away after listening is that slick and smooth jazz vocal that almost makes the track feel much further removed from hip-hop than it actually is.
In reality, the rap is strong, the rhythm is good, the flow is confident and, as mentioned, there’s more than enough change and evolution throughout the recording to take you on this little journey as the music moves along. Nothing gets tiresome, there’s a lot going on, but it all seems relevant and fits in effectively. The track has a lot of creativity, and it doesn’t come at the cost of clear cut self belief and even swagger. The essence of hip-hop is easy to detect, and it’s fused here with a number of different genres.
By Rebecca Cullen
Rebecca is a Musician and writer from Manchester, UK, with an MA in Song Writing.
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