Queue for Love

If you come across a teenager who is into hip-hop nowadays, it's almost a surprise if they don't understand the genre as the ultimate and dodgy mainstream between bling-bling and crunk, but appreciate hip-hop's golden era starting in the late '80s instead. With his debut album Quipo, Italian producer Populous already showed that he drew his very own conclusions from the jazzed up beats and positive vibes of the Native-Tongues movement around a Tribe Called Quest and de la Soul. Whereas Quipo still displayed a mildly bulky attraction influenced by abstract electronica, Queue for Love now has a much more homogeneous atmosphere and a warmth fed by carefully-selected samples from soul-jazz and soundtrack records from the late '60s and early '70s. Unlike the aesthetics of recent, dominating approaches to hip-hop, Queue for Love is a triumph of the DIY ethos. After all, Andrea Mangia is just a kid with a computer and an incorruptible taste. Queue for Love isn't pure sampledelia, though. A lot of the guitars, e-bows and glockenspiels on this album have been recorded in the bathroom of Populous' tiny student apartment. This album is smooth and balanced and hip-hop at heart, reaching out to songwriting, ambient, folk and film scores. All of this is delicately held together by a remarkable concept of "soul" and obviously, "love."