On their album An Evening with Silk Sonic, released today: “Working together as Silk Sonic, Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak revisit that bygone analog era (the 70s) in a hybrid of homage, parody, throwback and meticulous reverse engineering, tossing in some cheerfully knowing anachronisms,” (New York Times). “They flaunt skill, effort and scholarship, like teacher’s pets winning a science-fair prize; they also sound like they’re having a great time.”
Mars and .Paak inhabit different regions of the R&B/Soul/Pop/HipHop vortex, but the overlapping section of the resulting venn diagram is intriguing — and apparently synergystic. The NYTimes continues: “Silk Sonic comes across as a continuation for Mars and a playfully affectionate tangent for Paak. Mars is a multi-instrumentalist with a strong retro streak … Paak’s catalog has delved into more complicated matters. On his albums, named after places where he has lived, he switches between singing and rapping, and his lyrics take on contemporary conditions; he’s also a musician steeped in live-band soul and R&B, and a hard-hitting drummer … On An Evening With Silk Sonic, Paak’s specificity merges with Mars’s pop generalities, while both of them double down on craftsmanship and cleverness.” With Parliament Funkadelic’s bassist Bootsy Collins serving as something of an intermittent master of ceremonies, the album “revives the sound of 1970s groups like Earth, Wind & Fire, the Spinners, the Manhattans, the Chi-Lites and the Delfonics … a Fabergé egg of an album: a lavish, impeccable bauble, a purely ornamental not-quite-period piece. Mars and Paak don’t pretend to be making any grand statement, but there’s delight in every detail.”
After a short intro peppered with compound chords, the tune settles in somewhere in the E major/E Lydian neighborhood. That duality is spelled out multiple times in the chorus (the first time at 0:44):
F#/G# — A/B — Emaj7
The use of densely-packed chromatic bass motion combined with compound chords as connective tissue (1:44 and elsewhere) keeps us happily wondering where we might touch down next. At 3:16, an extended outro leaves earth’s atmosphere entirely as the groove falls away. We continue to ascend a ladder of brief modulations (3:54), further and further into an ecstatic stratosphere — but not without a knowing and neighborly wave from Bootsy.
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