The radical yet melodious music of Injury Reserve
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Since 2013, Arizona rap trio Injury Reserve, originally from the Phoenix area, have been trying to make pop music sound. Composed of rappers Stepa J. Groggs and Ritchie With a T, and producer Parker Corey, the group was defined from the start by its eccentricity. Fueled by the isolation of the desert and the mentality of an outsider, the music of the trio’s last three full projects has charted a course from alt jazz-rap to something even more experimental. Working in a place with a limited rap scene, they played the first gigs with punk bands at house parties. Just looking at them – a multiracial, intergenerational group of everyday misfits united by chance (and a skate shoe) in a dry hip-hop spot – it seemed unlikely that these guys would merge into one of the groups. of the most avant-garde raps.
When Ritchie moved to Phoenix with his mother, a Vans executive, to open a store, Groggs was one of the first employees. Corey, a high school swim captain, didn’t start listening to music until he fell from a truck and broke his collarbone. The trio recorded their groundbreaking mixtape, âLive from the Dentist Office,â from 2015, after hours spent in Corey’s dentist grandfather’s office. The members of Injury Reserve seemed like normal guys, and in some ways incompatible, yet the music they made was anything but ordinary. “Dude, we look like rap Weezer / But if you think that’s just hooks, bring ‘Ether’ back,” Ritchie rapped on “Bad Boys 3,” making a connection between the band’s underdog status and the perception that their music was only rap-adjacent. “I’m stunted all season long, have to floss a lot / Dude, I’m dressed like Carlton / I’m the Black Ben Carson.” The best songs from Injury Reserve are always facetious this way: turn disparity into disruption.
Last June, while the group was on the cusp of a sonic evolution, Groggs passed away at the age of thirty-two. He was the bond of the group, binding it to the ground as his colleagues sought an aerial expansion. As the oldest statesman in the group, Groggs delivered somewhat more level-headed and self-effacing verses. While many rappers embrace the precariousness of rap stardom, stability seemed to be their holy grail. In song, he usually faced his alcoholism and told himself to become more responsible. Groggs’ professional approach stabilized the team, even though he encouraged his associates to explore their limits.
Injury Reserve’s choppy new release, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, recorded in the months before his death, is the first to fully realize the group’s vision. Unrelated and, at times, alien, the album is a post-rap epic, exploding with poignant, eventful, cluttered and glitchy music. The team’s high-density sound finally opens up into a universe of self-contained abstraction, venturing away from the lyric-based structure of the song and into an ever-evolving wave of power electronics. For a crew that marks the distance traveled by how their music can become peculiar and abnormal, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” is a light year.
The album was inspired by a 2019 show in Stockholm, Sweden, where a performance in the back of an Italian restaurant led the trio to make a more improvised set, which led to the spontaneity of the registration. They sketched out the eleven songs for the album over the following months, and although “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was completed after Groggs’ death, Ritchie insisted all that was missing was only one of his verses on the album. Whether planned or not, Groggs appears significantly less in “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”. Previous projects have seen the band’s two rappers split mic time equally, but in keeping with the more formless nature of this album, there is less emphasis on arrangement or balance of any kind. that is. Groggs’ presence is felt throughout the commotion – in the echoes, sound bites, call-and-answer moments, and two remarkable verses – and his voice resonates every time.
While both have been proficient rappers on their previous releases, neither Groggs nor Ritchie has ever been a great tech or storyteller. Their experimental sound was sometimes undermined by the uninspired and encrypted formatting of their measures. The verses here are less routine. While the album is written on purpose, what is said is rarely the point. Flows and rhymes exist primarily to create friction or texture in compositions. Sometimes, like on “Superman That”, rappers bring melody to a shattering sound production, serving as the axis around which everything else breaks down and starts up again. Elsewhere, on songs such as “Footwork in a Forest Fire” and “Wild Wild West,” they rap in conjunction with feedback signals. Words lengthen and distort, or degrade and stand up. Corey, a sound designer with a mad scientist’s curiosity, has always been the driving force behind Injury Reserve, but he’s never been so ready to deconstruct. “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was mixed by rapper, producer and engineer Zeroh, an unpredictable artist of LA beat music. Together they make up the sonic dynamics of these songs, and the thrill is in anarchy. It was in the smoldering wreckage of the sound of Injury Reserve that the members found the radical yet melodious music they had been looking for from the start – it’s not rap, pop or punk, but it’s is also all of these at the same time.
When Corey and Ritchie announced the album, their rating mentioned “haunting pre-echoes” in the music. Its damaged quality and the almost constant sense of unease seem to hint at the loss of the group. Ritchie recorded his verses alone in a dark room, so he could pop out of his own head, and a few of them beckon a spiritual presence filling the space. “I scan the room, I see pieces of you scattered around / It’s those same patterns that will get us through the next chapter,” Ritchie sings on “Top Picks for You.” “Your blood flows in this house / And your habits long afterwards. Whether written about Groggs or not, the lyrics take on new meaning in his absence. âBy the Time I Get to Phoenixâ is the last finished music from Injury Reserve. It is also by far the best. It is the first of the group’s projects to sound more than the sum of its parts, to feel unique. The two remaining members do not know if the group will continue. In either case, the cocktail of emotions sparked by listening to the album is as shocking as the album itself: the satisfaction of seeing this motley team find their marks and perform the perfect one. three-way weaving, and the sadness of knowing that they will never do it again.
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