My introduction to Raury came when I watched the Sept. 22 episode of “The Late Show.” (As I’ve written about before, Stephen Colbert is pretty damn good at featuring artists.) He came out with an impassioned performance of the single “Devil’s Whisper” off his debut LP “All We Need” released this past Friday. This was his first (and what will be far from his last) trip on the music headline. He followed a Colbert interview with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a Mexican soccer jersey with Trump’s name crossed out on the back.

 

 

The 19-year-old Atlantan is hard to place under any one genre. When you think he’s hip-hop, he throws in some soul. When you think he’s soul, he throws in some folk. His music is less a chaotic mix-match of a bunch of unrelated genres and more of a groundbreaking force for creating a new sound altogether. Just a quick glance at his collaborators shows how diverse his influences and background are — in his short career he’s already collaborated with Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, indie-electronic artist SBTRKT, southern hip hop icon Big K.R.I.T. and Wu-Tang driving force RZA.

One of my favorite songs from Raury’s debut album is “Forbidden Knowledge,” his collaboration with Big K.R.I.T. This is the best example of his spin on modern hip-hop. The production and flow scream Outkast, while the social consciousness screams Kendrick, but everything else feels his.

 

“Friends,” another track off the same album, is almost comedically different from the tone of songs like “Forbidden Knowledge.” An upbeat, pop-rocky beat and guitar instrumentation by Tom Morello accompanies Raury’s lyrics about how much his friends mean to him. Raury’s multi-talentedness is evident here; a happy-go-lucky pseudo-indie-pop song by the same artist as “Forbidden Knowledge” and “Devil’s Whisper” that actually works is amazing in its own right.

 

Don’t write off Raury after he leaves Syracuse, Raury is as up-and-coming of an artist as Syracuse gets with his refreshing take on modern American music as we know it. I’d put my money on him sticking around for a long while.

If you have any interest in getting in on a new artist before the rest of the world’s caught on to them, you’d be making a mistake by missing out on this show. When his name’s on the top of the festival lineups and charts soon enough, you can reminisce about how Syracuse found him (and you saw him) before he got big.

Published on October 21, 2015 at 9:37 pm