Obnox - Niggative Approach

Pitchfork 78

Lamont Thomas has made seven Obnox albums in as many years, and they’ve all been bold expressions of his wide vision. But his third, 2014’s Louder Space, was a true breakthrough. The hip-hop and R&B strains that course beneath his noisy one-man garage rock came into sharper focus on that record, his first made in a proper studio. It also showed that Thomas could delve deeper into specific sides of his persona—in this case, by crafting legit rap jams—without sacrificing the many styles of which he’s capable.

The three Obnox albums that Thomas made after Louder Space were solid and diverse, but Niggative Approach feels like its true spiritual follow-up. The album is heavily focused on beats—Thomas has drummed in many vital Cleveland post-punk outfits—and filled with earworm-ready grooves. If Louder Space was his hip-hop album, Niggative Approach is his funk platter, bubbling with big bass lines and filled with studio touches like horn sections and keyboard accents. There’s still a lot of punk spirit here; the album’s title nods to hardcore legends Negative Approach, whose singer John Brannon opens and closes the album with spoken exhortations to Thomas. But Niggative Approach is first and foremost about groove.

Many of Thomas’s grooves are so simple and powerful they feel instantly classic, as if he plucked them from some hidden vault of magic funk tricks. They also help create some of the most upbeat music he’s ever made. After Brannon’s brief invocation, Niggative Approach opens with three tracks ripe for blasting from car windows while cruising down beachside strips. “Hardcore Matinee” is positively bouncy, while “Jack Herer” sounds like a dream take on Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead.” “State to State” soars on a funky guitar line, chiming keyboard chords, and Thomas’s multi-voiced hums. Things even get romantic during “Carmen, I Love You,” a groove-ballad that Thomas could’ve sung while lying on the grass staring at clouds.

Balancing that early sunniness, Niggative Approach gets denser, noisier, and more complicated as it progresses. Thomas melds different styles through masterful layering, piling sounds onto each other so that they merge and fuse rather than blur or obscure. In tracks like the slow-building “You” and the haunting “Beauty Like the Night,” he builds walls of sound by letting each element—echoing vocals, wavy chords, rattling beats—settle against another. At his most extreme, as on “Audio Rot,” he buries everything so deep it sounds like the song is playing a few rooms away. But that’s the exception on Niggative Approach, which mostly maintains a crisp clarity no matter how thickly Thomas boils his sonic stew.

Thomas takes risks on Niggative Approach, which is pretty standard for him; nothing he’s made as Obnox has ever played it safe. Yet the boldest aspect of this album is how unabashedly hooky it is. Past Obnox albums were more about ebb and flow, alternating catchy jams with shorter jams or abstract interludes. But here Thomas doles out blow after blow, happy to jump quickly from one feel to the next. In less experienced hands this could be a recipe for listener fatigue, but Thomas continually finds new angles, maintaining diversity even as he’s charging full steam ahead. On Niggative Approach, his knack for variety and nuance is the strongest it has ever been.