Vulfpeck’s new album hits below expectations

“The Joy of Music, The Job of Real Estate” is the name of the most recent album of a band you probably haven’t heard of. This band is a crew of guys that go by “Vulfpeck.” Vulfpeck is a Jazz/Funk group with a decently sized following, even within Fargo North. The band consists of four core members, three of whom have been members since the band’s founding in 2011: Joe Dart on bass, Woody Goss on piano, Theo Katzman on; vocals, drums, and guitar, and Jack Stratton on drums. Each of these different players has an influence in the jazz world, and this is evident within their style of playing. For example, piano player Goss listened to Thelonious Monk throughout his childhood, which is very obviously his main influence. Listening to these artists gave the band great musical ears, improving their ability to really feel their music.
Before talking about their newest album, I’d like to analyze one of my favorite songs by them to give context to their style of playing. This song is going to be “Animal Spirits” from The Beautiful Game (2015). This is a good example of a song they really feel, and even through the recording you can tell they’re having fun playing it. The song is super funky in its feel, and it’s written in Db major. The intro gives an allusion to the song possibly being in 2/4, which is uncommon for jazz. It usually accents the second and fourth beat of each measure. So for the song to start out in almost a 2/4 feel is strange. This changes to a common time funk groove for the rest of the song, initially there aren’t any outstanding accented beats for each measure. As soon as you hit the chorus you get your typical 2 and 4 beat feel. During the intro of the song, there are looped handclaps that are translated into the drum beat through the rest of the song. The last thing about the beat is the synergy between the bass and the piano through the entirety of the song, especially the chorus. The piano and bass match perfectly, following the motif created by the vocals through the chorus. The drumming to match this synergy follows a traditional 2 and 4 snare beat, but accents and ghosts on the high hat trail the piano and bass perfectly. All of this combines to create a feel that can get absolutely anybody grooving.
The new album Joy of Music, Job of Real Estate is interesting to say the least. It opens with a 2 and a half minute synth intro. Hearing this initially confused me, because it gave off a really intense R&B vibe. I’m really glad to say that this feel didn’t persist through the rest of the album. Following the intro was a track called “3 on E.” Hearing this track was nice, because it immediately opened with Dart’s funky signature bass playing. This song is a very typical Vulfpeck chart, but it features a familiar face on Vulfpeck songs, Antwaun Stanley. Stanley is a jazz singer with a vocal tone like no other.
Hearing his voice come into this song made it so much better. Nonetheless this track was a vulfpeck standard, but still good.
The rest of this album followed that typical Vulfpeck style of a jazzy funk beat, until I heard “Something,” the eighth track of this album. I was driving when I initially heard it, but something caught my ear. . . The drums. I recognized the drum beat almost instantly, a half time shuffle beat. This typically isn’t anything to take note of, but this just happened to be the man who came up with it that was drumming the chart. This man is Bernard “Pretty” Purdy, the creator of the Purdy shuffle. This is a shuffle beat with the middle note of each triplet cut out of the high hat and moved to a ghost note on the snare. It’s made for songs that are slow, but still need a solid driving beat. This happens to be my absolute favorite drum beat in the world so hearing it sent me over the moon. Past this song, there were two more, “Santa Baby”, and “Off and away”. These two songs were again, typical Vulfpeck types of music.
My final stance on the album is that it seemed to be a good album, but nothing super special for what Vulfpeck is capable of. Ill rate it three spartan heads out of five purely because I know that they have so many better songs. It also seemed like the album wasn’t super long. With ten charts, the album only hits 32 minutes. With a little bit more patience and time, they would be able to create a more complete album. They could create an album that felt more unique to their music. Despite my rating for the album, this album is fantastic. I highly recommend listening to this album and I encourage listening to “Animal Spirits” ASAP because the sooner you listen to that masterpiece, the sooner you can really groove with the big kids.