Kaytranada: AIN’T NO DAMN WAY! Album Review – Warungku Terkini

Kaytranada announced his new album with a hedge: “This album is strictly for workouts, dancing, and studying for my people who love beats.” But compared to the overstuffed guest star extravaganza Timeless, AIN’T NO DAMN WAY! is a cool breeze of a record at just 34 minutes, all instrumentals, and only one feature credit. It lays bare the Canadian producer’s preternatural gift for making beats that bridge the gap between hip-hop, house, and mainstream EDM, infused with the Haitian rhythms he grew up with. He’s deep in the (comfort) zone here, sticking to what he does best: turning unlikely samples into deceptively complex bangers. It’s the sound of an artist casually strolling into his imperial phase, where even his low-key tracks are brilliant, floating just a few inches above everyone else.

Put another way, AIN’T NO DAMN WAY! is a self-conscious return to Louis Kevin Celestin’s earliest days, when a good Janet Jackson edit set off a chain reaction that led to him opening a whole Madonna tour in 2015. But this record is built with the experience and expertise of a decade spent in the FL Studio mines. Every drum hits with purpose, the basslines walk and burrow every which way, samples and voices are embedded in strange but intuitive ways. It’s a beat tape that works as pop music for a generation of fans who have been conditioned to view instrumental electronic music as worthy of their attention, too, thanks to prominent representatives like Celestin himself.

First single “Space Invader” comes together with a loose and limber confidence rarely heard in contemporary dance music. At its core is an off-beat swing learned from artists like J Dilla and other iconoclastic producers. Kaytranada orbits around everything from mid-’80s Prince to peak-era Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to the skeletal future-funk of the Neptunes, who produced the Kelis song that “Space Invader” samples. But it’s no mere remix. Celestin rearranges the vocals, Burial-style, so they make a phrase that doesn’t exist in the original song, the meaning and emotions twisted into something new, and there’s no trace of the original’s oddball tropical funk. It feels classic in at least four different ways, but it’s also glittering and modern, the rare example of an artist setting out to please everyone and maybe succeeding.

AIN’T NO DAMN WAY! is consummately smooth, but it rewards close reading and detective work. Brilliant things are happening underneath the gleaming surface: Just listen to how he twists 808 State’s warm acid house classic “Pacific State” into overheated concrete jungle hip-hop complete with ’90s G-funk squiggles. It’s almost unrecognizable, but old-school techno heads can still clock it. Even more impressive is his flip of Tangerine Dream’s “Love On a Real Train” with “Championships,” a Donuts-calibre edit that turns the German kosmische group inside out with very little left of its original mood or sound. Instead, it just sounds like Kaytranada doing a little Slum Village worship, instantly recognizable as his own music rather than a Tangerine Dream song. Speaking of Slum Village, there’s also the stunning “Shine Your Light For We,” which reworks a Barry-White-via-Cappadonna sample into a beat that worships at the altar of Detroit legend Andrés: feel-good but rickety, joy with the barest hint of sadness underneath.