AEM033 Freshwater

Gen­er­ally I write about bands but today I’m going to write about an album, Cold Duck Com­plex Presents Fresh­wa­ter: Bad Love. Skirt­ing the gray area between solo album and full band release, Bad Love is a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort, the musi­cal voice of Joe Car­dozo (alias Fresh­wa­ter) fil­tered through the hip-hop/rock/jazz machine that for the last 7 years has been called Cold Duck Com­plex. Our story begins in Amherst, MA in 2002 when the Cold Duck Trio, a jazz and funk group fea­tur­ing Car­dozo on bass, Makaya McCraven on drums, and Jeff D’Antona on keys, began col­lab­o­rat­ing with rap­per Platy­pus Com­plex.

The first time I saw Cold Duck Com­plex play was in the win­ter of 2004 in my high school gym­na­sium. It was a pretty thin crowd, maybe 40 or 50 kids stand­ing around with their hands in their pock­ets, not really get­ting into the groove. A lack­lus­ter sound sys­tem, shitty acoustics, and fac­ulty chap­er­ones sip­ping cof­fee in the cor­ner didn’t con­tribute much to the mood. But in spite of the unin­spir­ing ambiance, I was floored. Cold Duck Com­plex grabbed my ear and wouldn’t let go.

Admit­tedly, that was a long time ago. I was an impres­sion­able seventeen-year-old with a bud­ding inter­est in jazz which seemed com­pletely at odds with my secret love for hip hop. By hip hop, I really mean main stream chart top­ping MTV jams because this was before I delved into the wide world of under­ground hip hop. I was con­fused. I hated pop­u­lar music on prin­ci­ple. I had recently begun play­ing the bass, and con­se­quently viewed funk as the pin­na­cle of musi­cal evo­lu­tion. I spent my days sali­vat­ing at Jaco Pas­to­rius and Vic­tor Wooten solos. I couldn’t respect a genre in which the music took a back seat and the vocal­ist got all the glory, but some­thing about hip hop moved me.

And then I saw Cold Duck Com­plex. This wasn’t some guy spit­ting raps over an unin­spired sam­pled beat. It was a funk band with a rap­per. Platy­pus Com­plex knew how to tear up the mic, but he also knew when to step down and let the band indulge in a ten-minute extended funk jam. And jam they can. The name Cold Duck Trio is a nod to the jazz stan­dard “Cold Duck Time” by Eddie Har­ris so as you might expect the band is well schooled in jazz and funk. More­over, they play together with incred­i­ble syn­ergy, each mem­ber an astute lis­tener and par­tic­i­pant a musi­cal con­ver­sa­tion. Eureka.

Now that I dwell on it, I might have been one of those kids with my hands in my pock­ets but if I was, it wasn’t for lack of enthu­si­asm. If I wasn’t danc­ing, it’s because I was strain­ing to catch every word, every note. And I’m pretty sure I was nod­ding in silent agree­ment. After the show I picked up a copy of Fig­ure Heads and popped it into my player the sec­ond I got back to my room. It stayed there for months. And although my musi­cal tastes have evolved con­sid­er­ably over the past 5 years, Cold Duck Com­plex is one band that I’ve kept com­ing back to.

If you’re gonna like Cold Duck Com­plex you have to accept the fact that this is a white boy rap­ping. And yes, he does sound a lit­tle like Eminem, at least until you lis­ten to what he’s say­ing. But Platy­pus Com­plex is one of my favorite lyri­cists out there. His rhymes are some­times pro­found, some­times goofy, but always clever and deliv­ered with impec­ca­ble flow. And in an era where both cul­ture (pop stars) and counter cul­ture (hip­sters) are obsessed with image, it’s refresh­ing that Plat­a­pus Com­plex doesn’t try to be some­body he’s not.

“I ain’t whole­some authen­tic­ity trip for hip hop, aight? I grew up in a town with­out a stoplight.”

And so I was pretty dis­ap­pointed in 2007 when the band started to dis­solve. First D’Antona left the group. He was replaced by Darby Wolf but before long McCraven moved west to Chicago, while Car­dozo and Platy­pus Com­plex headed south to New York. Although Cold Duck Com­plex had acquired a solid fan base through­out the north­east­ern United States and Europe, logis­tics made reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tion and per­for­mance impossible.

And then from the dust Fresh­wa­ter was born. Car­dozo was offered a grant by friend and studio/venue owner Ed Wierzbowski of the Art and Music Fac­tory which allowed him to ded­i­cate him­self fully to his musi­cal endeav­ors. He pro­posed to his band mates that he take the lead on a project focused on his work as a pro­ducer and com­poser and they agreed. So it began. Two years later, in July 2009, Cold Duck Com­plex Presents Fresh­wa­ter: Bad Love was released.

Car­dozo com­posed most of the music on the album but all mem­bers of Cold Duck Com­plex added their own touches. Car­dozo explains, “whether some­one plays a part I came up with or not, they always add their own fla­vor to it.”

Essen­tially, Fresh­wa­ter is what hap­pens when you take Platy­pus Com­plex’s unique lyri­cism and flow along with the funky instru­men­tals of the Cold Duck trio and pimp them out in the stu­dio. Extra vocals, more instru­ments, and a mas­ter­ful pro­duc­tion job make for a big sound. The epic builds that Cold Duck Com­plex hinted at in songs like Lucky Me, are exe­cuted to extremes under the umbrella of Fresh­wa­ter. It’s often over the top, but that’s part of the fun. The chiller num­bers sound a bit like G Love n Spe­cial Sauce, the heavy and often polit­i­cally charged num­bers approach Rage Against the Machine, and the sex­u­ally charged funk jams are rem­i­nis­cent of vin­tage Red Hot Chili Peppers.

A-side “They Don’t Wanna Dance” most closely falls into the first cat­e­gory. A catchy instru­men­tal hook, tight beat, and picked bass pro­vide ample momen­tum in this laid back jam. Nor­mally I’m skep­ti­cal of any rap­per that spends to long talk­ing about rap, but in this case I think it works pretty well. For the most part, it’s reflec­tive rather than ego­tis­ti­cal. One of my favorite lines — “to the melody of my melan­choly machine, I do my best to for­get what I mean.” The cho­rus expands upon Platy­pus’s per­sonal chron­i­cles, lament­ing the way so many musi­cians take them­selves too seri­ously and have for­got­ten how to have fun. “They don’t wanna dance no more, they just wanna watch the clock tick.” And dance is exactly what Fresh­wa­ter does (in a metaphor­i­cal sense) in the song’s tri­umphant end­ing which fea­tures a peppy trum­pet sec­tion and Ale­cia Chakour’s one woman gospel choir.

B-side “Com­ing Home” is lyri­cally a bit more edgy. Platy­pus Com­plex gets up on his soap­box does some old fash­ioned preach­ing, weav­ing extended metaphor after extended metaphor.

“Been a pris­oner of flesh, a ser­vant to nerve end­ings
A straight and nar­row arrow in a curve bend­ing
Been the archer and the tar­get, the marcher and the car­pet
The civil­ian and the sergeant fol­low­ing free markets”

At first his mes­sage seems polit­i­cal, but in the final line of the first verse he shifts direc­tions — “But all I’m try­ing to say is I’ve never been in love like I love you today.” In con­text, it sounds as if he’s con­fess­ing his love for the music. And so, it’s only nat­ural that the last two min­utes the music pushes its way to the front of the mix. Again, Car­dozo builds another epic end­ing in the stu­dio. Per­haps this one takes it over­board, with stadium-rock drum fills and more stacked vocals from Chak­our. But I love the soar­ing bass solo (if such a thing isn’t an oxy­moron) which rises to the top despite by being drowned in fuzzy effects. It’s the great tran­si­tion into the end, a quiet fiz­zle, which fades with­out a bang, mak­ing it hard to delin­eate where the music stops. A per­fect choice for the final cut on the album.

In short, kudos to Car­dozo for tak­ing the ini­tia­tive and keep­ing things going (and I truly mean going, not just main­tain­ing the sta­tus quo) despite the geo­graphic dis­tance. All I can say is that I hope Fresh­wa­ter doesn’t remain exclu­sively a stu­dio project, because this kind of music is so much fun to see live.

Nate Green­berg

Side A — They Don’t Wanna Dance Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Com­ing Home Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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