In the all-new single and music video “Soul Sister Retribution,” pop-rapper Rockie Brown establishes herself as a powerhouse vocalist who can rhyme with as much zeal as any of the big boys can, and audiences are rightly taking note. Brown’s last release, Mad World, was built on the foundation of angst-ridden confessions, robust beats and swarthy basslines, and in its six-song tracklist, “Soul Sister Retribution” might be the most charismatic of the set. This is a rapper who has no time for fluff and frills in her sound, and that’s made more than clear to us inside of her new track’s first few bars.
The bass parts in this song have a lot of extra fuzz, not dissimilar to the style of low-end tonality found throughout Mad World, but the dissonance doesn’t somehow cloud over the slick verses Brown is spitting from within the eye of the storm. I actually think it’s important to understand her use of indulgent textures in “Soul Sister Retribution;” she could just as well have stricken them from the bottom half of the song and focused our attention more towards her vocal execution, but instead of that, she takes what amounts to a far more urbane route in spreading the melody out as much as she can.
I hadn’t heard her work before getting my hands on a copy of “Soul Sister Retribution” just recently, but if this is a fair sampling of what she can get done in the studio, I’ll be quite curious to see where she goes from here creatively. The DIY-style grime on the instrumental wallop in this song is enough to keep any listener – hip-hop fan or not – engaged from start to finish, and if it were to be incorporated with more of the sleek pop conceptualism hinted at in other cuts from Mad World in a full-length album, it could prove to be quite the lucrative tool for Rockie Brown’s music moving forward.
