The Good Fight

Oddisee's breakthrough album: The Good Fight is imbued with love, honesty, and selflessness. It is virtuosic in its musicality, direct in its language, and infinitely relatable.

In a landscape overrun with abstract indulgence and shallow trend-chasers, the Prince George's County, Maryland artist has created a record that reminds you that it's music before it's hip-hop. For Oddisee, "The Good Fight" is about living fully as a musician without succumbing to the traps of hedonism, avarice, and materialism.

It's music that yields an intangible feeling: the sacral sound of an organ whine, brass horns, or a cymbal crash. It's a meditation on our capacity to love and the bonds binding us together. It's our ambition and greed warring with our sense of propriety - a list of paradoxes we all face when living and striving.

Oddisee's production simmers in its own orchestral gumbo. You sense he's really a jazzman in a different form, inhabiting the spirit of Roy Ayers and other past greats. The Fader has compared him to a musical MC Escher, hailing his "grandiose and symphonic sound" and "relevant relatable messages." Pitchfork praised his "eclectic soulful boom-bap."