Adult Themes

A couple months after Summer, the track Leon Michels co-produced for the Carters Everything Is Love, was heard as a sample source on Don Tolivers Heaven or Hell, and only a week after Chicano Batman issued their Michels-produced Invisible People, Michels El Michels Affair returned with Adult Themes. The first LP of original El Michels Affair material since their 2005 debut, its not a work of kitsch, as the title might imply, but a sharp -- if smoothly navigated -- turn away from the grime and menace kicked out on their 2009 and 2017 Wu-Tang Clan tributes. Dusty soul and funk are still felt, but its as if the idioms have been filtered through the more elegant work of scholarly European and British composers of film and library music -- Francois de Roubaix, Piero Piccioni, and Alan Hawkshaw, for starters -- with a dash or two of prime David Axelrod and The Italian Job-era Quincy Jones. Some sly trap-styled drums excepted, this is another time warp for the theater of the mind, and its neatly tied together with recurring salient elements that prevent it from slipping into mere background fare. ~ Andy Kellman