Baby Elephants
Baby Elephants
7.5/10

            The only bitch I have about this sweet ass Prince Paul project is the excessive intros and segue ways between tracks. I mean, an intro and an outro is one thing, but six tracks of 30 second dialogue bits? Excessive. And I understand that you are trying to tell the story of how fucking amazing Bernie Worrell is, the dude is a keyboard virtuoso, but, well, I feel slightly ripped off by 6 of the 17 tracks being a waste of what could be Worrell’s screaming synths wailing on my eardrums and blowing my mind. Now, I know that many of Racket’s esteemed readers are saying to themselves “who the fuck is Bernie Worrell?” and running to Google to find the fuck out. Worrell is one of the sweetest keyboardists ever. I mean, when George Clinton says that this guy taught P-Funk how to layer sounds, that’s a big fuck deal, no? After P-Funk, Worrell was also in Talking Heads, so go look him up.
            Ok, so that was a long gripe. I know, but I had to get it off my chest. “But the tunes! How are the tunes?!” you ask. Well, amazing. Shifting between the funk organ riffs of track 3 to the circus-reggae of track 4 to the soulful R&B of track 7, Baby Elephants goes on a journey to spread the Gospel of Worrell to a new generation, Lord knows my hands are up in praise.
-Jonathan Yost