A few weeks back my good friends in Irie Society opened up for a random show at the Vault. Their reggae singer/freestyler Ethan is a longtime friend of mine and I try to check out his stuff whenever I can, we even used to play back-to-back acoustic sets all the time. Up until tonight, however, I had never seen Irie Society even though they had played at a few parties I was even at. I've heard their CD and it's really good; they actually burned the initial copies of it here in my bedroom on my CD duplicator. So it was about time I finally caught a live set.
Tonight a bunch of homies rolled out to support and I came with KP and Brian, showing up around the midway point of the first song. I saw some homies towards the left side of the stage so we cruised there and greeted everybody before paying real attention.
Irie Society plays like Cali hip-hop strongly influenced by reggae and beach music. Ethan's background is playing in several reggae projects but for this he mainly just sings and freestyles in his funny reggae way. He sounds like Brad from Sublime alot of the time, and does alot of random scat stuff like Barrington Levy does. Really his singing is much better than his freestyling because sometimes his freestyling goes on a bit long and veers towards the direction of being a ramble. But his contributions are kind of what make Irie Society what they are, otherwise it would just be 2 dudes rapping over kinda-reggae beats. Ethan makes it seem like a party.
My homie Jimmy makes the beats and man o man are they good. I'm not one to really describe that kind of stuff because I have no background in making beats, but his stuff flows really nicely, has a good danceable stony feel to it, and more than anything his beats sound really clean and like professional. There are so many layers it seems, it's not just a standard beat and melody there are all sorts of flourishes going on. Good stuff.
Both of the MCs, I like Chasen's rhymes more than Trevor's but both are really good. It seemed like they knew what they were gonna say because the flows were so tight but I talked to Ethan's brother Nick after the show and he said that everything was freestyled. I can believe that, because every time I ever seen Chasen at a party he's rhyming about something or other, but they were never as together as what I heard when they all played live. Maybe it's because they have more time to think when they're onstage than when they're trying to battle off-the-cuff or make shit up when they're drunk at a party, but both of them were holding it down the whole show it was really cool.
I had run into an old homie, Mike, partway through the performance and we talked for a quick minute before watching again. After one of the songs Ethan says "You guys wanna hear some live music?" and everybody cheers and I see Mike, who had just been right next to me, walking onstage towards a drum set that had been set up in the background. Sneaky! Jimmy picked up a bass and they fiddled around with the bass amp and Ethan put on a guitar and they fiddled around with that. It looked like the old band they had been in together, who I can't remember the name of right now but was the shit a few years back. Before you know it they were rocking out some smooth smooth jams while Chasen and Trevor kept it real on the mic. It seemed like they didn't have a whole lot of practice recently on the live instruments because Ethan and Jimmy seemed off a few times, but it was cool as shit and especially at a party or something it would have been off the hook.
The Vault sound guy had announced before they played the first live song that they had like 7 minutes left, which I think they went longer than, but clearly they wanted to play more than that and had planned on more songs. All the homies shuffled out and really we were most of the crowd that night. When the next band, some halfrate radio rock band called Betawolf, played I went back in with KP and Brian and it was just really lame. Nobody was in there but a few families and like the members of bands who were gonna play after. I don't know why the Vault promoters put Irie Society on this bill but it worked to fill the place for a few minutes.
Irie Society is badass live, they're great for parties, and they're the homies. Look'em up.
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