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| Popmatters |
 The first time I listened to this album, idly, cursorily, it seemed to me that I was listening to a collection of two very separate branches of music, one Latin-American, with bits of cumbia and descarga, Cuban sounds, and so on, and the other African-American, with soul and tingling guitars and sex, with no cowbells or any of the other things that characterised the cumbia and the descarga. That only changed at track 16 when Caribbean-accented Sir Jablonsky came into the album with “Juck Juck Pt 1”, a reggae guitar bopping around an innuendo. It wasn’t until I listened to it a second and a third time that I began to hear that middle ground, the combinations, that the compiler Roberto Ernesto Gyemant was writing about in the booklet when he said that Panama was a meeting place of cultures, the local countryside sound, musica tipica, supplemented handsomely by styles from the outside.I had been seduced, I realised, by the noises my brain thought it already knew, on one hand the Colombian sound of tracks like “La Murga de Panama”, and on the other hand the North American guitar in The Duncan Brothers’ “Dreams” and the soulful “Ooo-oos” of “Ain’t no Sunshine” by The Soul Fanatics. I was overlooking the unfamiliar and letting the familiar mush together in my head. Over time I tried to sort it out, but the mixture is, in some places, fairly dense. The music itself is bright and eager. A photograph inside the booklet shows the five Duncan Brothers striding toward the camera in outfits that must have been brilliantly white in real life; the age of the reproduction has given them a milky blueish tinge. Flares make loops around their ankles....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| The timing wasn't right for the Boy Better Know collective's first Tropical mix: in 2006, while most grime was trying to erase the distance between itself and hip-hop, dubstep was mired in death-crawl dystopias, bassline had yet to hit popular consciousness, and UK funky hadn't even happened, the world may not have been ready for a collection of feverish girly rave tunes reimagining the space between grime and garage. Emerging from the febrile imaginations of grime artists JME and Skepta, Tropical was messy and ravey, an exhausting sprint through spiraling, Todd Edwards-style vocals and rough-hewn 2-step loops, as if grime's low-bit, high-contrast aesthetic had circled back to swallow early UK garage whole. But its rave was radically dysfunctional, too hysterically unbalanced for ordinary dancing. Instead it seemed a glorious, unrepeatable one-off, a sound whose moment had passed before it could arrive. But the unrepeatable always does repeat, and here we are five years later with Tropical 2. Replacing Skepta with several younger-generation acolytes, JME's belated sequel already feels more at home in the wider world than its predecessor ever did. What's changed in the intervening half-decade is less the Tropical sound (though that has, too) than the sonic constellations into which it re-emerges. Whether in post-dubstep (Zomby, Rustie, the Night Slugs stable), or the undergrounds of funky, grime and bassline, virtually everyone seems to want to make some brand of lurid, hypercolor (let's call it) rave-house, sonic approximations of the fixed grin of partying past your physical limits. As if to underscore this point, Tropical 2 features several tracks from bassline-into-grime unifier DJ Q, whose pretty but disconcerting, stuttering house tunes constitute the tropical sound at its most resolved, their glowering basslines, gauzy synths, and overlapping sighs molded into a disorienting edgelessness even as they stagger, like a room with no corners. Even more pointedly spelling out the Tropical raison d'être, widescreen instrumental grime specialist Royal-T perversely switches to unabashed house for his sole contribution, "Cool Down". Like a hyperactive dub of Robin S.'s "Show Me Love", "Cool Down" is the year's greatest dance anthem-in-waiting, an exhilarating victory lap of organ basslines, xylophone riffs, and a quavering Greek chorus of female vocal samples....full text |
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