Chill out music seems to be all the rage these days. If you go into any remotely trendy eatery/coffeeshop/clothier, you are likely to hear some variety of an ever-so-mellow, soothing, hipster type ambient music. Trby Trio like this distinction they even tried really hard to sound extra exotic and cool by keeping those wacky umlaut dots in their name. The group is a collection of German producers Rainer Trby, Christian Prommer, and Roland Appel. Together they compose Trby Trio a dynamic threesome that is involved in all aspects of the electronic scene: Remixing, producing and DJing. Think of them as the DJ equivalent of the “Super Friends.” The group is apparently gaining clout in Europe where they have been recruited by various dance artists for a multitude of remixes. In what might be described by some as “Jazz-House” and by others as “Nu-Jazz” the Trio provides us with 15 extremely mellow tracks of chill-ariffic splendor.
- Paul Wong
- Blitzstein (David Wolber), Eva (Carla Milarch) and Welles (Travis Reiff) contemplate a whole new world.<br><br>Courtesy of Daniel C. Walker/Performance Network
DJ-Kicks is a warm and jazzy listening experience. The lush samba beats, smooth jazz loops and quirky effects set the right tone for some downtempo chilling. Yet interspersed throughout are numerous annoying verbal samples someone reading a folktale or poem for example. The album consistently is right at the cusp of settling into a nice groove when the moment is sucked away by a weird vocal sample things like folktales of Egyptian princesses and other random verbal diarrhea. With a genre like Acid-Jazz and Jazz-Fusion, the album is all about setting a certain mood the mood is important to convey the downtempo tone of a chill album. The random samples merely clutter the consistency of that mood. Strange vocal samples aside, DJ-Kicks does a very adequate job of putting us in the right mood. The Latin and Brazilian touches also add just the right amount of spice to their sound. They help DJ-Kicks come across as the audio equivalent of a bowl of Campbell”s Soup warm, satisfying but definitely not cutting edge when it comes to soup products.
Grade: C+