Thundercat, real name Stephen Bruner, is a man so innately rhythmic that to say he’s possessed by his bass would be an understatement twice over. Thundercat is as much his bass as he is a master of layering clothes; even his bass face has a bass face and at Nile Rodger’s Meltdown Festival at London’s Southbank Centre (his 2019 European exclusive) things got weird quickly.
You don’t need to be a jazz fan to grasp Thundercat but you’ve really got to be prepared to focus. Seventeen songs of bizarrely beautiful paired relentless squelches and a band of three was all it took to wide smile beckoningly take the crowd on a trip to end all trips - a pretty impressive feat given the polite toe tap inducing seating arrangements of The Royal Festival Hall.
As a fully functioning working body of LA cool, all musicians present were undeniable in their otherworldly excellent musicianship but at times it felt less like an ensemble and more a sonic chase to see who could play the fastest. The answer as yet remains unclear but whilst Thundercat did his six stringed wizardry and a one-off lyric forgetting incident (understandably he did have a lot going on), drums churned gleamingly to insane heights of splintered euphoria and keys sounded like keys, sax, stressful freeways and everything in-between.
It wasn’t all anarchic grooves however as despite the sporadic appearance from a loomed projection of a Thundercat mask that kept glaring into all of our souls, ‘Songs for the Dead’ and ‘Lone Wolf and Cub’ gave us all a chance to regain a healthier breath-rate and appreciate the evening for what it really was: unparalleled.
Somewhat unsubtly as the evening drew to its most hectic the second the opening wobble of favourite ‘Them Changes’ dribbled into the crowd and they lost their minds (or at least, got up off their seats). A deliciously indulgent pre-encore number it stood out as one of the more readily graspable numbers but couldn’t have been any more, or any less, Thundercat in masterly. A tribute to fellow Brainfeeder’s Flying Lotus and the late Austin Peralta (Lotus and the Jondy) closed the night for real and then back into a different kind of warped reality we all emerged. If perhaps now with a bit more experimentation in our strides.
