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Raury hopefully has a very long and successful career ahead of him. I have a feeling he will eventually channel his raw talent and creativity to produce a masterpiece. He clearly is still exploring the range of his talents and trying to place those into a musical context that makes sense to him. His combination of sound, culture and emotion is unlike anything else out there today. The hardest part about making the type of music Raury is producing is probably that there is really no blueprint for what he is doing. For the most part though, Raury has extremely good taste and takes a “less is more” approach on the tracks that work best. For example, “Her” and “Forbidden Knowledge (with Big K.R.I.T.)” could have used a bit more of a heavy handed editor.
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Sean Famoso said 'This launch is another example of the power. On July 14, 2017, the label signed a distribution deal with Interscope Records, and launched a creative space studio in Atlanta called LVRN Studios. In 2016, they added two more artists, DRAM and 6lack, to their roster. Some moments on All We Need work better than others. The first artist under the label was a singer-songwriter, Raury. Raury flows seamlessly between the worlds of soul, jazz, experimental folk, spoken word and hip hop. His debut mixtape, Indigo Child, has more in common with Animal Collective’ Sung Tongs than it does any mainstream hip hop album. We find Raury incorporating rap much more frequently on All We Need. On one of those tracks, “Peace Prevail,” Raury shows his rap skills, but also brings the perspective of a young person with a long time horizon: He’s at his best when he flows over minimal instrumentation–a guitar here a simple drumbeat there. It’s not so much what he says, but how he says it, that makes All We Need one of my favorite albums so far this year. His lyrics are relatively straightforward, focusing on topics ranging from relationships to world peace. His music oozes the optimism and confidence of a seasoned professional. On the 19 year-old’s debut LP, All We Need, he keeps you guessing and wanting more. All We Need is a dreamer’s soliloquy, wracked with starry-eyed whys when the answers aren’t that hard to find.Raury’s genre-blending mix of freak folk and hip hop demonstrates a rare musical intelligence that would be impressive for an artist of any age. The shooters and dealers Raury chastises in his songs may be morally bankrupt, but there’s no consideration of the counterargument: that those bad guys are the inevitable result of injustices no campfire singalong can fix. It’s worth noting in all of this that Raury is a smooth 19 years old, nestled neatly in the years where young people dream of changing the world before reality grinds hope to rubble. On the Adam-and-Eve yarn “Forbidden Knowledge,” he prays his music will last longer than “stones like stones from Stonehenge.” Tale of broken trust “Woodcrest Manor II” clunkily chides an ex-friend who’s “salty like those fries you be supersizing” and a drug dealer with “Tommys like Hilfiger.”
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And Raury often trips himself up over wonky turns of phrase. He paints his world with a broad, simplistic brush: God, love and friends are good snakes, hate and the devil, bad. Where Raury’s ear intrigues, though, his pen can occasionally grate. The experimentation is fearless - even if it sometimes goes wayward, landing him in over-reaching, overly quirky spots, like the jam-band grout of “Revolution” or the Tom Morello-assisted ’80s pop pastiche “Friends.” The set freely bounds from the acoustic blues stomper “Devil’s Whisper” to the sweet soul of “Peace Prevail” to sprightly indie pop on “Crystal Express” like a paper boat tossed about by a storm. It’s somewhat misleading, however, to call his imaginative debut album, All We Need, hip-hop.