Choose Your Weapon

Rating

Choose Your Weapon is a neo soul album that takes influence from a variety of genres including jazz, soul, R&B, West African funk, and samba and latin grooves. Choose Your Weapon's lyrics touch upon themes of supernatural topics, technological subjects and death. Upon release Choose Your Weapon was met with universal acclaim from music critics, who praised the album's production and musical structure, and was named as one of the year’s best albums.

Album: Choose Your Weapon
#	Song Title	Time
1)	Choose Your Weapon
2)	Shaolin Monk Motherfunk
3)	Laputa
4)	Creations Part One
5)	Borderline With My Atoms
6)	Breathing Underwater
7)	Cicada
8)	Swamp Thing
9)	Fingerprints
10)	Jekyll
11)	Prince Minikid
12)	Atari
13)	By Fire
14)	Creations, Pt. Two
15)	Lung, The
16)	Only Time All the Time/Making Friends With Studio Owl
17)	Molasses
18)	Building a Ladder

Performer Notes

Personnel: Nai Palm (vocals, keyboards); Paul Bender (guitar, keyboards, programming); Simon Mavin (keyboards, vocoder, percussion); Perrin Moss (keyboards, drums, percussion).
Recording information: Ghost Oak Studios, Mornington Peninsula, Australia; Headshell Hideout, Melbourne, Australia; Instrument Zoo, Miami, FL; Oakland Studios, Melbourne, Australia; Sound Park Studios, Melbourne, Australia; Willow Grove Studios, Melbourne, Australia.
Photographer: Wilk .
Arranger: Hiatus Kaiyote.
When Tawk Tomahawk was picked up by Salaam Remi's Flying Buddha, the label added a bonus version of "Nakamarra" -- the album's most direct, traditional song -- with a Q-Tip guest verse. The young Australian avant-R&B quartet needed it more for visibility than for credibility. The move worked, at least with Recording Academy voters, who nominated that version for a 2014 Grammy in the category of Best R&B Performance. Tawk Tomahawk provided a lot to absorb in its 35 minutes. In some ways -- literally, for example -- Choose Your Weapon is twice the album. Seventy minutes in length, it can be split in half and taken as two volumes that surpass what preceded it. The band refines and broadens its attack. From track to track, one ingenious idea trails another. Vocal melodies and guitar wriggles sneak up and tickle the ears, burbling electronics mingle with spiny acoustic guitars, time signatures abruptly switch and stun. Considering five fragmentary interludes of varying consequence and so much nonlinear structuring within the proper songs, Choose Your Weapon isn't always easy to follow. The lyrics of athletic vocalist and guitarist Nai Palm, dizzying on their own, mix natural, supernatural, and technological subjects and are delivered in an array of styles. She gets more personal on late 2014 A-side "By Fire," a burial song inspired in part by her father's house-fire death. Its significance is easy to miss through the battle-theme opening, frenetic mass of swirling/zipping synthesizer action, and octopedal drumming. As out-there as the material gets, rich highlights such as "Laputa," "Borderline with My Atoms," and "Breathing Underwater" are thoroughly winsome, cast in warm light. Progressive-eclectic DJs like Gilles Peterson, Garth Trinidad, and Carlos Ni?o could not have dreamt them up. Within the context of a playlist, any one of a dozen songs here could bridge '50s bop to '60s MPB, or '70s art rock to '80s boogie, or '90s neo-soul to 2000s dubstep. Equally remarkable is that none of it seems devised. It's like these musicians simply radiate the stuff. ~ Andy Kellman

Professional Reviews

Clash (magazine) - "Time signatures skip and dance between chorus and verse, instruments overlap harmoniously and Nai Palm's vocals are a constant source of measured acrobatics atop it all."

Fishpond works with suppliers all over the world to bring you a huge selection of products, really great prices, and delivery included on over 25 million products that we sell. We do our best every day to make Fishpond an awesome place for customers to shop and get what they want — all at the best prices online.

How Fishpond Works

You can earn a 5% commission by selling Choose Your Weapon on your website. It's easy to get started - we will give you example code. After you're set-up, your website can earn you money while you work, play or even sleep! You should start right now!

Are you the Author or Publisher of a book? Or the manufacturer of one of the millions of products that we sell. You can improve sales and grow your revenue by submitting additional information on this title. The better the information we have about a product, the more we will sell!

Submit Information