Kyteman
The Hermit Sessions
“Do you like trumpets?”
Sadly that’s not exactly the question GMB poses on “She Blew Like Trumpets”, but I’ll roll with it anyway. It would be fairly rhetorical anyway, given that horns and hip hop go together like, er, knakworst and uitjes, and Kyteman excels at making both. Hip hop and playing his trumpet that is, not dodgy snack food.
“The Hermit Sessions” will probably turn out to be the most important Dutch album of 2009. It’s a soulful, emotional record that genuinely pushes the boundaries of hip hop, while its sheer quality and open-mindedness should finally change the general public’s perception of what hip hop is and represents for the better.
It’s a record of the last two and a half years Kyteman spent squirreled away in various locations around Utrecht, and it’s as much a product of that city and its hip hop scene as Kyteman’s individual talents. “The Hermit Sessions” features no fewer than ten MCs: the vast majority from Utrecht, with fellow travellers GMB, Unorthadox and Bang Bang coming along for the ride as well. While each brings his own distinct flavour and flow to the track, Kyteman’s sheer personality stamps itself over the record so it never loses its consistency.
The wide reaching nature of the album means that everyone’s going to have their favourite tracks, but the highlight, or the biggest crowd please is likely to be “Sorry”. Kyteman pours himself into an emotionally charged performance, that’s it’s impossible not to be moved by. If you need any proof, then just listen to the crowd’s reaction (it’s a live recording from his debut show at Utreg Centraal back in 2007). At the start you’ve got the general level of chitchat, but 30 seconds in, you can hear a pin drop such is the spell that he’s cast on the audience.
But it’s not the track that’s most representative of the album (if there actually is one). As great as “Sorry” is, it doesn’t have the experimental edge of “Blow The Whistle On’Em”, whose whistled hook is sheer brilliance, or “IT Circus.” This features Unorthadox, a MC whose machine gun flow is a perfect match for the industrial beat that Kyteman furnishes him with. It’s breathless, exhilarating stuff.
As a miserable bastard though, I’d go for the brooding melancholy of the tracks featuring Pax and Reazun. They both get a solo joint each – Reazun lays down an affecting vocal over a hypnotic horn line on “Une Seule Fois”, while Pax spits straight on “Peace Without The Rest” for the first 90 second before Kyteman drops the melody to relieve the tension built by the sparse mechanical beat and harrowing vocal.
It’s tracks like this, and “City’s Burning”, with their ‘warts and all’ depictions of the realities of urban living that are the most powerful on the record. Sadly just like every city, even “The Hermit Sessions” has parts you’d rather avoid. The lacklustre “U-Town University” comes off more like a joke you had to be there for, rather than an ode to your hometown. There’s also an ill-advised excursion into Death In Vegas style melodrama on “Stand For Something” that features a slightly tedious, slightly over worthy, spoken word piece from Bang Bang.
But these are the only blots on an otherwise spotless landscape. While he might find it hard to leave his hometown behind, it’s now time for Kyteman to emerge into the wider world. It’s waiting for him.