You’d think with a name like Adam Morgan Prince’s, a
Philadelphia maths teacher by day and beat magician by moonlight, an alias
would be unnecessary. But perhaps the assumed-persona of ‘Hectic Zeniths’ is
more appropriate than might first appear; an anagram of the German word ‘Zeitschichten’,
meaning “layers of time”, it’s an exact description of what makes this album
tick. An amalgamation of the last sixty-years or so of American musical flavours,
wrapped around instrumental hip-hop, gentle electronica and intricate piano
melodies.
Whilst that might sound a little capricious on paper, it is
anything but in execution. Indebted to the sample-based musical revolution of
the ’90s, tracks like ‘I Might Drown’ see Prince lay a simplistic, infectious
piano refrain around a haunting vocal sample, breakbeat drums and percussive flourishes. It’s instrumental hip-hop at its purest, its most
infectious and unabashedly whimsical. The result is a pop song that sounds like
a collage of auditory elements gracefully shifting around one another,
everything balanced and harmonic, making for a melodramatic melody that swells
and swells.
That the record is a conscious product of American musical heritage is at the forefront to what Prince looks to achieve. The listening experience
can be likened to auditory voyeurism, with each track playing on different
flavours, techniques and sounds from the rhythm and blues, rock & roll, and
pop that define USA’s musical legacy. ‘Then And Now’ blends unrelenting hip-hop
drums with a vintage soul vocal, power-rock electric guitar riffs dominate the
interlude ‘Why Shoot Debris About It?’ , and the melody of ‘The Loneliest City’
sounds like the breed of pop-rock that REM mastered; it’s clear Prince has set a
wide net of not just influences, but points of reference. This concept
is at its most effective on ‘Zeitschichten’ where mournful pan-pipes, a
hymn-like vocal sample in which you can hear crackling vinyl, and a distant
string player combine to create something incredibly poetic and powerful.
Feeling somehow timeless and contemporary at the same time, it is a song to get lost in, conjuring images
of everything from black-and-white western films to dimly-lit city skylines.
Low key in its approach but innovative in its use of
arranged layers and melody, ‘Hectic Zeniths’ is both an incredibly enjoyable instrumental
hip-hop crossover album and an unbelievably considered, intricate collection
of melodic sound. Lasting less than thirty-minutes, the album is bereft in length where
it is thick in density, both musically and historically, yet as the final chord
of closing track ‘An Empty Shell’ slowly fade to black, it is the record’s overwhelming sense of
optimism, melody and rhythm that will linger longest in your mind’s ear.