BPM

AMG Review of BPM

Andy Kellman
All Music Guide

A Detroit producer with strong personal and professional ties to fellow Motor City dwellers Jay Dee and Slum Village, Waajeed is an up-and-comer only in the sense that he has yet to take a full step from out of the background. BPM is a remarkably tight set of instrumental productions; in a blindfold test, casual underground-heads might confuse a good percentage of it with the work of Jay Dee -- the aesthetics and dynamics are similar, with plenty of crispness in the hi-hats, snares, hand claps, and finger snaps -- but it's otherwise apparent that he has his own imprint to leave. Oftentimes, it's not the actual beats that make his tracks click -- "Elzhi" is the best example, working the spaced-out keyboard outro from the Steve Miller Band's "Fly Like an Eagle" into a web of guitars and a buried female-vocal refrain. And even when the tracks are relatively spare, containing only two or three elements, there's not a moment when you're left to think that rhymes would be beneficial. The CD version adds a handful of tracks not available on the vinyl, and some copies were packaged with a second mixed disc containing material from splinter projects and collaborations. Two tracks come from Waajeed's Platinum Pied Pipers group, who had recently inked a deal with Ubiquity.