Supreme Beings of Leisure – Divine Operating System — music review
Erotic electronica. Voluptuous vocals. Simple-set rhymes with often Yoda-esque messages of empowerment and rich avid description. Brave beats and originality. Oh, Supreme Beings of Leisure, you had it once but came up short this round.
Obviously honoring the classic greats of jazz and soul with an added twist of crisp post-modernistic precision, your self-titled debut was amaaazing and, to be fair, almost impossible to top. And it’s true that you’ve since lost guitarist/programmer Rick Torres and bassist/programmer Kiran Shahani. But while your first album celebrated diversity (you were a melting pot — Russian, Japanese, Iranian, Irish, Puerto Rican), your sophomore entry Divine Operating System reeks of rank repetition.
Maybe you’re searching for marketability? Then you’ve succeeded. There’s no doubt clubbers and disco retro-ists will get a kick out of it; I’m positive they’ll love track 7, Divine and that feat by itself is fine. But fans of your previously languid love-affair-inflicted lullabies are granted only a glimpse of the good stuff: Get Away is a frivolously fantastic excursion, Catch Me is a martini mermaid on a swanky swell half-shell, Freezer allow’s Geri Soriano-Lightwood’s vocals to peek out from behind the clouds and from behind a single awkward “UFO-beat” (you know, the synthetic percussion element that kind of sounds like an outer space suction cup).
While I can’t deny that your beats still make me wanna move my feet, there are quite a few unforgiveables. Touch Me’s intro is like a too-cute game show or pachinko parlor tune that transitions into something that’s trying too hard to be track 4 and fails. Calamity Jane is a little “P. Diddy-ish” ditty. A few songs such as So Much More (ironically towards the end of the disc) drastically drops the tempo in an attempt to diversify the mix. There’s an abundance of Lawrence Welk Big Band orchestrations and misplaced energy. In most cases, you’re distracting us from one of the main attractions… Geri’s voice.
Although thoroughly enjoyable and party-mix playable, Divine Operating System lacks in the very signature sound of your “supreme” name and title, and that is neither “divine” nor a necessity for daily human processing (”DOS”). Oh Supreme Beings of Leisure, you’re still one of my favorite bands but my optimism is slipping. For now I’ll just have to listen to Lazy (Torres and Shahani’s new endeavor) to wile away my laments of how nothing lasts forever. *SNIFF*
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