In the fourteen months since Andy Petr released his Rapper Turned Singer EP, he’s moved from his hometown of Milwaukee to Brooklyn, given away a handful of miscellaneous tracks, worked on remixes and collaborations, and, most surprisingly, turned 20. Don’t let his age be a deterrent, though. The seven songs on this EP are dense, genre-defying works with traces of boogie funk, acid techno, French house, broken beat, and ambient. That’s a lot to fill in twenty-two minutes, let alone a full-length, but Petr’s talent lies in being able to blend all these influences together into a coherent, mature release that’s also fun as hell.
The album opens with some party-starting house jams, “Obsession” and “Want Me.” The title track in particular feels destined for the dance floor, with the chopped vocals exclaiming, “I just can’t stop!” When the next song comes along, the feeling’s mutual. “Want Me” takes a different approach, though, incorporating elements of acid house and boogie funk vocals for a relentless party vibe. The rest of the EP follows suit in its unpredictability, running the gamut from hip-hop instrumentals (“Ready”) to slow-burning diva anthems (“I Know”). This amount of influences and genre-hopping may sound exhausting on paper, but Petr executes his ideas with deft precision, allowing only two tracks to hover above the three and a half minute mark, and even those longer pieces leave you wanting more.
The real surprise is the closer, “Heaven’s Voyeur.” It’s a solo piano piece, with washes of effects that build to a quiet finale composed of inaudible whispers. It might seem like a bit of a misstep to include such a serious piece after six tracks of dance music, but it works because, as the title suggests, Andy Petr is obsessed with music. He wants to make as much of it as he can, and if that includes songs that are more influenced by Phillip Glass than J. Dilla, then so be it. The quality of these songs shows that Petr is a talent worth following, whether he’s playing club shows or a concert-hall recital.
