BLVD: Music For People

By: Nick Boeka

The recent addition of skillful linguist MC Souleye and San Francisco’s livetronica three-piece, BLVD, has served up some new beats to fill out the group’s ever-evolving musical palette. Their fourth release, Music for People, finally catalogs this union of sounds that many fans have been witnessing live over the last year-and-a-half. Feeling the groove, Souleye combines his conscious wordsmithing and fast-paced flows with the soundscapes painted by beats (Dylan McIntosh), thick, deep bass (Tripp Bains), heavily effected guitar canvases (Curtis Sloane), and intelligent programming. When combined, these elements produced a series of tracks where each can stand on its own legs. The album itself is almost arranged and presented this way, as there aren’t a lot of common transitions from song-to-song, as on previous albums.

If there is something to be said about a band that wants to reinvent itself, exploring new horizons of musical exploration and breaking through the common barriers that hold many groups back, then one could speak for a long while about what the new BLVD has produced with these cuts. McIntosh and company have come up with tracks like “Music is Medicine” and “Sounds of BLVD,” which combine elements of their familiar electronic sounds infused with the trip-hop style of Souleye’s vocal rhymes. The genre bending and strongest track, “Stamina,” has a guitar arrangement that will surely strike a chord with the indie and electro scenes, where lines are strummed out fast and on beat, laying the foundation for vocal lines, which are seemingly his slowest on the album, yet speak to the times we live in. The sole instrumental, “LIT,” breaks up the album’s eleven tracks and offers the only real evidence of the old BLVD sound. Even a veteran song, “Times Up,” is reworked and reinvented, and precludes the potential that BLVD is facing with this new direction the group is headed.

Make sure that you get your digital today and groove out to the sounds of BLVD throughout your lives. This Music is of you. This Music is for you, people.

Ask for change shift your paradigm
As for me I set a fire on the boarder line
Let’s meditate dance break down the barriers
Clean the slate from the Mass Hysteria

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