Gnotes, Rhymes and Beats

By calling his album Rhymes and Beats, Gnotes sets himself to a higher standard by putting the emphasis on the musical material of the album. (If he’d called the album Dollaz and Hos, for example, he might be able to slack off a bit.) Gnotes (a.k.a. Sean Dwyer) wrote the rhymes and produced or co-produced most of the beats (as well as playing some of the instruments), so the title is appropriate. The album doesn’t entirely live up to its title, mind you, but it’s enjoyable enough.

There are some good beats on the record. The beats range from live-sounding rock to Meters-style funk to more typical hip-hop/R&B beats, and Gnotes produced most of the best beats here himself. The best one is “Dodgey Bullets,” which is a giddy combination of big drum loop and cool slide guitar with a cunningly deployed delayed guitar part and a break that just adds to the fun. “We Can Roll” is a slower, stripped-down R&B beat with a strummed guitar and a beautiful female vocal part. “Promises [Remix]” sounds like a slow, tense, low-rent Meters groove with a synth stolen from Bernie Worrell, plus a distorted rap that increases the tension.

He sounds a lot like POS, but his rhymes aren’t that good — they’re serviceable at best, and ponderous. You might not notice, except that he calls attention to them with the lyric excerpts printed in the liner notes — for “Tower of Babylon,” his selection is “Running circles around the circus of clowns / So when the sun surfaced the clouds, a purpose was found / So put it down like a foot to the ground / Or an axe to grind, it’s been past time / Take a look around,” which won’t be getting quoted anywhere else besides by his mom. “Change for a dollar? That only makes senseless,” in “Belly of the Beast,” is better, but could be tightened up further.

Rhymes and Beats certainly lives up to the beats part, as Gnotes produced a considerable variety of beats on the album. Some of them are really good, and there aren’t any straight-up clunkers here. But his rhymes need help. As long as you don’t pay much attention to the rhymes, it’s enjoyable. Maybe he should have called it Beats and Rhymes?