Afterparty Babies
The culmination of my burgeoning obsession with electronic music and culture was my sophomore album, Afterparty Babies. My dad used to joke with people at parties about his kids being accidents, saying something along the lines of “Oh yeah, they were definitely after-party babies!” It made me envision a whole generation of kids like me who might be the direct result of a Really Good Time. I wanted to translate the excitement of discovery I was experiencing as an amateur DJ into my music at the time. I didn’t know how to properly produce house music or make tracks that would functionally work in a club environment. That said, the music itself is full of happy accidents. The results were typically more inventive than if I actually knew what I was doing. My production on this album had a wider spectrum of musical influences, ping-ponging between disco house, electro, techno, Baltimore club and nu-rave - sometimes all within the same song. I was inspired by electronic artists who defied genre: Daft Punk, Basement Jaxx, M.I.A., Maurice Fulton, Switch and Mr. Oizo.
Aggressive mechanical drum patterns, gnarly electro synths, oddball samples, rubbery vocal cadences, pop-cultural punch lines, honor-roll puns: All of these comprise the broad strokes of Rollie Pemberton's musical identity, and now, on Afterparty Babies, they feel like the fixed elements of a mature style.
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Freshly signed to the Anti- label, Edmonton rapper Cadence Weapon (or Rollie Pemberton) continues -- with his flat intonation and half-mocking confidence -- to help redefine the boundaries of modern hip-hop, something he began on his very excellent debut.
Afterparty Babies, the sophomore album from Canadian music critic-turned-rapper Rollie Pemberton, is a tough but scattered affair, referencing almost as...