The Jan Diaries — Theo Parrish, ‘Wuddaji’

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 5 October 2020

Six years after American Intelligence, Theo Parrish put out Wuddaji, and Jan Kinčl had pre-ordered it on the strength of a few snippets alone. This entry in The Jan Diaries is the review written a couple of days after the Spotify drop — deliberately not after one listen, because a Theo Parrish album that gives up everything on a first pass would be a different kind of record altogether.

What the record is

The six years were not idle: the four parts of the Gentrified Love EP series, Preacher’s Coming, What You Gonna Ask For and the single This Is For You all argued that Parrish was still on top of his game. What Kinčl finds most telling is an editorial decision Parrish described in an interview with Dega: the material was originally conceived as six records and was cut down to three. That restraint matters, because the previous double CD ran long enough to make listening straight through hard work, and Wuddaji does not have that problem.

The palette is the one Parrish has used for roughly thirty years — Rhodes and Wurlitzer, his particular way of stacking melody and harmony, his particular approach to rhythm programming — and the review makes a point of it. Plenty of producers, Kinčl argues, fake artistic growth by dressing the same content in new sounds; Parrish instead keeps digging into the same vocabulary and comes out deeper. The synthetic layers carry the emotional weight of acoustic instruments. Jazz, soul, blues, funk and deep house sit in the DNA, handled with enough command that the record reads as a constant dialogue between parts. It was cut in a studio and sounds astonishingly live and organic, and the long running times — three tracks past ten minutes, the rest between five and ten — exist so each idea can be argued out fully, intellectually and physically.

The part that stayed

Kinčl’s framing is that this is a record made for movement, for the soul and the body, for dancing and sweating. Some of it travels anywhere: Hambone Cappucino, Knew Better Do Better and This Is For You work in any room. But Radar Detector and the drum workout Angry Purple Birds were built with a specific room in mind — a small dark club with a serious sound system — and are meant to be remembered rather than documented. That distinction, between tracks that carry and tracks that need the right conditions, is what the review is really about.

Read the full piece

The full review, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Three minutes.

The Jan Diaries | Theo Parrish novi album - Wuddaji → redbull.com