Pell – LIMBO

Multicultural Musicality

LIMBO is an eclectic album with a mixture of cultural and ethnic influences pervading its music. Rap, hip-hop, synthesizers and Latino elements combine to create songs that have a truly original flare, and it keeps listeners on their toes from one track to the next.

The opening song, “Monday Morning,” projects a beautiful smoothness with gorgeous harmonization, lending an almost positive connotation to the chorus, “Baby it feels like Monday morning.” This track blends surprisingly, but coherently, from jazzy vocals into hip-hop.

The next couple of tracks take on a heavier tone, but then “Queso” picks up a tribal sound with a quirky beat and chorus to resume the lighter playfulness of the first track. “Supreme” reverts to a more heavy sound, primarily incorporating rap, as opposed to earlier tracks that lacked or minimized this component. The tone of the song matches the message, though, which deals with everything from sex, to drugs, to gambling. “Confession” continues a similar vibe as “Supreme,” both in terms of content and musicality. One poignant line is, “I would say I’m sorry but I can’t tell a lie / I’ve been feeling awesome living on a high.” The unique component of this song is an electric piano riff that pervades the whole track, at times even sounding disharmonious against the lyrics. This creates an unsettling, somewhat disturbing effect that seems in keeping with the message of the track.

“The Wild” begins with attention-getting, though repetitive, piano power chords. These eventually fade, unlike the prior two songs where the piano is ubiquitous, and it gives way to percussion, which soon defers again to the keyboard, until the two unite harmoniously for the song’s culmination.

Towards the album’s conclusion, the unique track “Incomplete” stands out, not because of extraordinary musicality, but because the vocals are multilingual. This indeed punctuates the variety of cultural representations that pervade Pell’s music.