Jai Paul is a 21-year-old from north-west London currently getting a lot of blog and A&R attention. We can see why. He's a warped pop star in the making; or rather he's what you imagine a pop star signed to the Warp label might be like. Of course, Warp already have a freak-funk future pop act on their roster, Jamie Lidell, who seems to alternate between straight commercial funk – as though he were a slightly edgier Jamiroquai – and out-and-out experimental electronica.
Jai Paul appears to be using his music to combine both extreme approaches. "Don't f*** with me, don't f*** with me," he coos in a light, airy falsetto on BTSU, the most acclaimed track on his MySpace, over mad 8-bit sonics, bursts of burbling bass, crisp dubspace beats and weird, warped – that word again – harmonies. But somehow, JP manages to make it all seem like a pop song.
Praise has been immediate for the tune, some comparing it to Hudson Mohawke – himself a Warp wunderkind who we described last year as "sounding like Crystal Castles holding a disco inside an early-80s Atari computer console with the entire crew of George Clinton's Mothership" – in a tussle with soul boy D'Angelo and Madlib. In fact, it's the latter's Mind Altering Demented Lessons in Beats that Jai Paul appears to have learned by heart. Or to put it another way: if J Dilla (RIP) found a way to remix Hot Chip from beyond the grave ...
He's a solo act, is Jai Paul, and Polydor are apparently eager to get to him first. He doesn't work entirely alone, though. On his MySpace he credits two females for their backing vocals, three alto and soprano sax players, a violinist, and someone for his "80s guitar solo" on one track. But Jai Paul manages to make their contributions seem like samples, cut-up fragments for him to manipulate at will from track to track. Those tracks are demos, and mostly they comprise snippets of what might one day become fully-formed songs.
Genevieve is particularly tantalising, a sort of harder, more British and urban take on chillwave, as though Washed Out had been dragged out of bed to a dubstep club. There's more going on in this 90-second clip than there is in most songs. It's pure pop overload, sheer sensory bliss, and what more far-sighted dreamers might have hoped chart music in 2010 would sound like.
