Album Review: NNAMDÏ, Please Have A Seat

It is a preserve for only the ridiculously talented – Prince, Paul McCartney, Dave Grohl – to write, produce and perform everything on an album. With Please Have A Seat, NNAMDÏ enrolls in this distinguished club, a feat made all the more astonishing, as the record skips through a multitude of music genres using a stockpile of different voices, even containing radio jingles that encompass the artist’s peculiar fixation with Mom & Pop furniture stores.

From the space soul of ‘Armoire’, through arena rock guitar stabs on ‘Dibs’ and its accompanying rolling breakbeats and submerged stoner psych, NNAMDÏ shifts smoothly between vastly different styles. On ‘Touchdown’, he voices every echo across an apparent infinite mirror of them, and rocks out on ‘Anxious Eater’ before descending into a jazz-funk breakdown. It’s some bag of tricks. Showboating, on lead single, ‘I Don’t Wanna Be Famous’, he even manages to rhyme a Countdown dream word – supercallifragilisticexpialidocious – which is beyond impressive.

Elsewhere, there’s the R&B-dented pop-punk of ‘Smart Ass’; a slice of shoegaze on ‘Grounded’; alternative rock on ‘Lifted’; a barbershop ‘quartet’ of rap on ‘Anti’; and a sci-fi soundtrack via-the anthemic ‘Dedication’. “Some days,” he declares on the album closer of that name, “I wake up ready to run as far as my legs take me” – a line that doubles as a mantra for an album possessed of boundless experimentation.

7/10