It's been a very, very long time since the heart and soul of Motown got any play or even a fraction of the respect it's due. Recently, the closest that anyone comes is some know-it-all pop tart or producer playing taxidermist with the genre and adding ample amounts of paint, irony and embalming fluid to it, thus making the new music a sad parody of greatness. Because nature abhors a vacuum (not unlike the one in the aforementioned atrophied shell), so has appeared Madcon's new album Conquest – the first in what we can hope will be a trend; a re-defining series of albums that will breathe new life into an ailing genre.
As Conquest kicks over though, it becomes abundantly apparent that, even in a cover of “Beggin'” Madcon isn't so much interested in doing the spirit of vintage Motown justice as in dragging the sound (faithfully) into the 21st Century; with all of the growth that urban music has experienced in the intervening years intact. Suddenly, while the sounds of Motown soul is the base for Conquest, it also mixes in archetypal hip hop (manufactured 4/4 beats, streaks of emcee-based rap vocal delivery) and reggae elements to round out the songs and make them seem more universal than the typically individualized niches of each. In that way, what listeners get is a bit of something for everyone; it's still held together by Madcon's vision, but runs a gamut of instrumental performance ability never found on a hip hop record. The difference in both the chops as well as the delivery of them on “The Sweetest Drug,” “Let It Be Known” and “What If,” is a prime example; said chops leave space between parts and are presented with extra attention paid to instrumental (in real-time) performance and clarity. That said, the album resembles the work of James Brown for the near-obsessive design and execution of it but better than most of those others that have tried to hijack Brown's style because Madcon isn't simply trying to re-invent the wheel, he's re-aligning the existing set and making it his own.
As Conquest winds to a close with the mellow-but-confident jam “Dandelion,” Madcon does betray that he is able to play by the pre-conceived notions of modern soul by wining and dining listeners but, while the song is fine and easy to swallow, it also puts into relief how willfully executed the rest of the record is.
While plenty of modern urban music singers claim to be fans of Motown and the music that came before them, Madcon is the first in memory to actually step off the stone that everyone else has been building on, follow his gut and do something different. Conquest is a stellar new outgrowth from what everyone else has been doing in urban music and it's made all the better by the fact that it's done with heart and a desire in the artist to recast the music. That's what makes Conquest a conquest in both heart and form.
Artist:
Madcon online
Madcon myspace
Album:
Conquest is out now. Buy it on Amazon.
