Photo by Rachel Buth
For more than a decade rapper Kid Millions has served as Milwaukee’s one-man answer to the Beastie Boys, filtering the spirit of classic hip-hop through the personalized lens of his own eclectic record collection and turning out some serious jams in the process. After years of kicking around in the studio, mostly to the amusement of himself and a relative handful of friends and fans in the city’s hip-hop scene, Millions finally reached a wider audience with two summer-friendly, infectiously funky singles from his 2009 album Recession Proof Rap: “Victim To The Beat” and “I Made a Mixtape,” each of which clocked significant airplay on local stations 88Nine Radio Milwaukee and 91.7 WMSE.
Those singles shared something in common, beyond Millions’ amiable, everyman rapping. Both were co-produced with Sage Schwarm, a local music-scene vet who has logged time in too many bands to list off the top of his head, including Wild Kingdom, Citizen King and Codebreaker. Given the duo’s long friendship and the response to their Recession Proof Rap singles, it only made sense that they would team up again. Their new project is Sounds of Time, and while the group is essentially a continuation of Millions’ solo work—Millions’ longtime DJ, DJ Deadbeat, even backs them during their live shows—their recent work has expanded on the pervasive funk and boogie disco of Recession Proof Rap with even more eccentric influences. “I feel like we’re definitely getting a better idea of what works now that we’ve been working together for years,” Millions says. “We’re all about trying different styles of music. We don’t have any real boundaries.”
That mentality is evident on the first pair of singles from the group’s new album, .......Again. “In The Graveyard” is the more typical of the two, an ’80s throwback caked in thick synthesizers right out of a Rick James or Funkadelic record. “Don’t Fall Off” is more of an oddity, a woozy soul/hip-hop/doo-wop fusion that departs from the party-ready mindset of the group’s previous singles.
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“There’s a little bit of everything on the new record, from indie-rock guitars to R&B to even some 1940s Lennon Sisters-style vocals,” Schwarm says. “None of those sounds are samples; they’re all our own recordings. It’s a little all over the place, but it also has a thread, sort of a psychedelic-funk thread that runs through the whole album.”
As fate would have it, the same ’80s funk influences that have inspired Millions and Schwarm for years are in vogue right now, manifesting themselves not only in the disco revival of acts like Chromeo, but also in the updated West Coast club sounds of DJ Mustard. Even this summer’s big pop hit, Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” played with the same retro electro-hop influences. Millions and Schwarm aren’t naïve enough to think they could have anywhere near the kind of reach of those acts—even at its most conventional, .......Again is far weirder than anything currently getting commercial radio play—but they’re happy that, at the very least, their sound is resonating with local radio.
“You can either be the kind of band that hates the radio or you can just make music that you like,” Schwarm says. “Luckily we make the kind that people latch onto.”
Sounds of Time play an album release show with JTODD and AUTOmatic Saturday, Nov. 29 at the Cactus Club at 10 p.m. The first 50 people will receive a free copy of .......Again.
