Paper Tiger All Over The Place

Paper Tiger’s All Over the Place is a moody record, but also muscular—with strong kick patterns, spare but catchy vocal sampling, and short songs that make their mark then make an exit. Paper manages a nostalgia without sentimentalism, a 90s-style urgency and earnestness. The lead single, “A Different Trish,” features some drum and bass patterns that could score a new Run Lola Run sprint scene; it’s a dark, tightly-wound, electronic universe built and dismantled in 3 minutes and 21 seconds. Paper Tiger has a long list of credits as a hip hop producer, but working solo allows his style room to maneuver; All Over the Place explores everything from slow, drumless ambient compositions to hard, dark dance music. There’s a unifying sensibility, though: the chord progressions lean melancholy, textured timbres feel a little like grainy film, and distinct song sections reveal his pop fluency. For this record Paper set aside some of his digital rig to work with hardware instruments, in part because of what they can’t do. “Creative limitations can generate new ideas quickly for me—also you can’t get email or breaking news on a synthesizer.” The product of Paper’s efforts is a 12-track album with a distinct cinematic quality; All Over the Place is one of those records that turns your life into a movie as soon as you hit play. The tides of synth in your headphones swallow up the din of traffic and strangers’ chatter and the frame rate slows on your walk home. And everything feels infused with some new, deliberate significance: the guy on the corner stuck to his phone becomes a sympathetic everyman, the cityscape is suddenly vivified by all the human stories unspooling in it—you in your headphones among them.