They Ain't Afraid Of No Ghostface Killah

"Honestly, until I actually saw the test pressing of the record, I never thought it would come out as this full LP,” says Matty Tavares of Sour Soul.

He wasn’t alone; there were serious doubts in the BADBADNOTGOOD camp. On paper, it seems like a weird move for bona fide rap god like Ghostface Killah to hitch his wagon to a trio of jazz musicians from Toronto who like to dabble in minimalist electronica.

Tavares takes us back to the record’s genesis to explain how it evolved: “Frank Dukes, who produced this record and is a really good friend who we now share a studio with, came to us three years ago and said, ‘Do you want to do a Ghostface record?’ because he had toured with him. So that’s where the initial plan got started before anything got locked in with Ghostface. Then we went to New York and left the songs with Frank, just instrumentally, because we were thinking, ‘Yeah, this would be cool but if it doesn’t work out we’ll still have these songs,’ but then he rapped on all of them. Then over the next three years we kept going back and forth to make it a real record.”

That back and forth, stuffed between BBNG and Killah’s busy touring schedules, was the time where Tavares’ doubts about the record really started to grow. He was aware it might never happen, just like the long-rumoured Supreme Clientele sequel or the DOOMSTARKS full-length.

“There were so many times that we were making it that we thought it wasn’t going to come out. We wanted the songs to be really good and Ghost wanted them to be really good, but we were touring so much and he was touring so much that getting little moments where we could get things into place was really hard.”

The timing of the album proved a blessing and a curse for BADBADNOTGOOD. While they were working on their record, Killah would go ahead and do two full-lengths with live instrumentation: 2013’s Twelve Reasons To Die with Adrian Younge and last year’s 36 Seasons with The Revelations. “We started working on it before Ghost had even done that Adrian Younge record, and all these other records he was doing with bands, so that was a bit disappointing. When we started we thought we were going to make this record, as a band, with Ghost, and then he did these other records… But then I kind of started to think it was cool that he’d done those other records. Because we both kind of interpreted similar influences in very different ways.”

For all the similarities between the last three Ghostface Killah records, Tavares is quick to point out a major difference. Sour Soul eschews the regular guest verses from the usual suspects, and helps to contemporise, if not revitalise, Ghost’s sound. “[Sour Soul] doesn’t have anybody from Wu-Tang on it. And that was on purpose, because we wanted to see how Ghost would sound like somebody like Danny Brown, or like DOOM – because obviously they’re amazing when they do stuff together.”