The release of Jesse Jagz Odysseus came as a follow-up to a series of events that have happened over the past week. After M.I’s public confrontation with Pulse’s Osagie Alonge, Chocolate City seems to be re-energised towards remaining on playlists. Some of the work put into achieving that goal has come by way of C-Kay’s ‘Who The F*ck Is C-Kay’, a hurriedly packaged 6-track EP and of course, the release of a Jesse Jagz’ own album after multiple release push backs.

Jesse Jagz may be understated for many things, but it’s rare to see the rapper go wrong with R&B fusions. Perhaps this is why “Alright” sounds like such an oversight off his new album. African R&B is coming to slow but eventual death as newcomers have increasingly sought inspiration from nether regions of trap and neo-R&B. The guest appearance of Styl Plus, an evergreen R&B popular choice pick should have even made all the difference for “Alright”, but except for cheap nostalgia, filtered through heavy bass and auto-tune, the track passed as a missed opportunity for Jesse Jagz.

Though Jesse Jagz’ re-entry into “Alright” with a rap verse, takes away some of the tired feel of the whole production, Styl Plus’s attempt to make sexy of a song that required more emotion and less talk about ‘haters’ is tough to hear. Through Odysseus, Jesse Jagz attempt to stay on the fence between innovator and re-inventor is omnipresent. This justifiably works on some of the undercuts from the album like “Wide and Blue” where Jesse uses an alternate piano sample of Chakademus’s 2000s classic, “Murder She Wrote”. But no where does it fail as catastrophically as on “Alright”, a song that could have gone any other way if Jesse Jagz leaned further to the side of him that wanted to re-purpose the sound of a fondly-remembered boy band for a younger generation, instead of an attempt to scale them on the same popular trap music infused mainframe we have been consuming for nearly three years.

Stream “Alright” via Youtube.

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