Ever since Steven Tyler and Joe Perry got together with Run-DMC for a raucous rap/rock attack on Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” white and black guys have come together in genre-jumbling, race-mixing hitmaking. Socio-culturally, this is a great show of unity—whether overground or underground—and huzzah to that. Aesthetically, though, it only works every so often. So, here is incendiary Wu-Tang Clan producer and emcee RZA and Interpol’s placid Paul Banks making their steamy contribution to the black/white, alterna-duo list, Banks & Steelz, and mostly it’s a fine, weird wine with chunky bits of cork in its bottling.
New Yorkers both, RZA and Banks are opposites on the temperament pole, and that difference sounds off immediately on tracks such as “Giant.” Starting on truck-horn-honking hip hop with its rumpled rhythm track way up front, baritone RZA enters the stage and commences/commits to a fast-paced, spittle-spraying flow, connecting the dots between East Coast and West Coast rap travels with time to discuss “cheesesteaks on a roll” in Philly. No sooner than RZA gets ready to boil over, Banks—who sounds like Ozzy Osbourne on his first solo album, no joke—comes in and slows things back to a bubble, atop a bridge that percolates with chiming, Beatles-ish charm. While RZA has never sounded so alive, Banks has never sounded so, well, dead.
This hot/cold, menace-and-moody pattern—it’s what most of Anything But Words’ song structures are all about, save for the hauntingly operatic “Ana Electronic”—succeeds in a cool, odd-couple fashion. Whether dipping into the shallow pool of clichéd sentiment that is the Latin lilting, clickety-clacking “Love + War” or the horror-show-hop of “Speedway Sonora,” Banks & Steelz love the rinse-and repeat process.
—A.D. Amorosi
