Tommy V
Silence Speaks Volume One
Tommy V, on the heels of Travel Size Drawing Board, is back in Silence Speaks Volume One. It’s the first collaboration between boutique label Filthy Broke Recordings, and seminal indie frontrunners, Fake Four, Inc.
It's the hoe-iest hoedown since we stopped putting hoes down.
As the title suggests, Silence Speaks is a largely instrumental record. Sans raps, Tommy V has painted a playful, danceable, and at times joyous ode to a life that’s worth living. I’d even call it happy. Real hip hop is a music of resistance. Even the classic party jams of yesteryear are rooted in the sensibility that even though we ain’t got shit, we ain’t gonna let it stop us from getting down. In that framework, happy can be a dirty word. But in a world where fear and anxiety and depression are all too often the norm, happy can be a form of resistance. To hold beauty dear. To smile in face of the demons. To dance on our graves. To put flowers in the barrels of their guns. This record makes me fucking happy!
Hand in hand with uptempo drums leaving vibrations across the sky and precision punctuative cuts like heat lighting (provided by Mr. Valencia hisself), Silence Speaks' instrumentation is superb. Harkening back to the Toca days there is a free sensibility to song structures and influences. It's a beautiful kitchen sink of sound. From keys to jazz-induced horns, goosebumps-inducing background vocals, violins, and guitars, the guests that Tommy V has involved have gifted each track rare and masterful craftsmanship. The closest thing a record like Silence Speaks is what the “beat scene” artists are doing at Low End Theory. By combining live instruments and pinpoint production, Tommy V gives the listener a musicality that is far too often missing in this lane. And boners.
With samples dropping in and out like a classic rap record, Silence Speaks has mature pants - the kind with the pleated fronts you steal from JC Penny before a court date - but also, it possesses the calloused thumb of a kid with a game controller in his hand. There is an adult air of lush and pronounced musical mastery, and then, like a fart noise during a test, a sample drops like a rap mixtape from 1994. It’s fucking perfect!
In addition to the musicians’ stunning contributions, there are several notable guests on Silence Speaks including the venerable Myka 9 (singing to a bossanova beat on “Voice and Instrument”), Max Heath and Child Actor, and label-head and foremost folk rap god, Ceschi.
Tommy V’s dope breakdowns take the listener on a journey. Thomas Valencia, you could hold my hand down any path through any garden, any ailse in any Rite-Aid, any alley through any sketch neighborhood, homie. The tracks meander only to return to the familiar, avoiding the lame two-bar sample dance done by so many bedroom producers. Let’s just say it, instrumental records can be banal, repetitive, and worst of all, boring. Silence Speaks is none of those things. It’s bossanova, it’s fly drum outros, it’s stopping to smell the flowers, it’s the tortoise AND the hare. It’s a record for today.
Timeless, sweet, and climactic, Tommy V’s Silence Speaks - like a megaphone of our times.