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Silas Short “Drawing”

“Drawing” feels rich and luxurious as well as light and minimal, a trick pulled off largely because Silas Short has excellent instincts for handling negative space. I imagine the core arrangement – bass, guitar, drums, keyboards so sparingly used they’re nearly subliminal – as a loose circular frame around his voice and all the empty air around it. There’s a lot going on in the song but it all just sort of floats by, with parts coming into crisper focus here and there but never distracting from the overall feel and composition. Short sounds like he’s internalized a lot of D’Angelo’s best elements as a musician without necessarily trying to sound like him as a singer, so you get something that feels both very familiar and distinctive as his high and delicate voice moves towards melodic and rhythmic turns that owe more to the cadences of modern rappers like Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti.

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