Love in all its varieties; we all have had our unique experiences of love. From the Young Gifted & Broke movement the hip-hop group @Peace, consisting of Home Brew’s Tom Scott and Lui Tuiasau, have released an EP all about the ‘L’ word. Girl Songs is a conceptual work, a preview of what is to come from the experimental artists. This EP shoves it in the face of the “fairytale romance” with songs describing all of the darker shades of crimson love. Love is the most complex of all emotions, and certainly the most dangerous. Girl Songs is an attempt to explore what love really is.
In Bar Stool Balancing Act the Jazz atmosphere is far from the hip-hop sound you might have expected. The vocal poetry set above this is a nice reminder that hip-hop and rap is all poetry, an idea that can get lost in the bass-thumping, auto-tuned hip-hop anthems you hear these days.
Cats Like Fish with its funky little drumbeats is the song pleading for a second chance. The fast rhymes of Cake, with its’ theme of adultery, is laced with the tones of temptation- in both the lyrics and music. 2 Die 4 is another song about the dangers of straying in a relationship, the more R’n’B flavoured song being an apology.
Anaesthetised is all heartbreak, and about how hard it is to move on and forget the pain of losing love. Flowers is a song about appreciating what you have while you have it, because some things just cannot last.
The EP is smooth and the music slinks effortlessly across the music player. @Peace have a real grasp with cross-pollinating with genres, playing with the beautiful base notes of Jazz, funk-beats of hip-hop and the soul of R’n’B. Girl Songs has a really ambient sound- in spite of some of the fiercer lyrics peppered throughout. Lui Tuiasau is a fantastic vocalist and Tom Scott is really commandeering in his delivery. This group brings a lot to the table and the product is a fine EP, an appetising taste of what is to come from @Peace.
@Peace disbanded in March 2015.