Odeal

One Liner: Afrobeats R&B from a genre shifting Brit
Wikipedia Genre: No Wikipedia - afrobeats, R&B, alté
Home: U.K.

Poster Position: Third Quarter - Line 15
Day: Saturday
Weekend Two Only.

Tito's Tent at 2:00.

Thoughts: I find it so strange when an artist has a pdf/downloadable biography.  Why not make this a webpage?  Am I missing something?

He moved around a lot as a child - Germany, Spain, Nigeria, and his native U.K. by the time he was a young teenager - which he credits with creating his genre-spanning style.  And he really does go all over the place - my first impression was like a male Sade from Africa.  His time in NIgeria was at a boarding school, and while there he learned to love local musical heroes like Fela Kuti and Burna Boy.  He came back to London and got to work with a laptop to release his debut EP in 2017.  Also, his biography is like so many of these written for musicians with absolute slop included like: "Odeal has proven adept at finessing any situation and making moves toward the next level. ... No matter where he lands, Odeal always comes out on top."  What an absolutely useless set of statements.  Does anyone learn anything about this artist from those?  Absolutely not.  Annoying.

NME calls him "UK's alté renaissance man" which I looked up to find it is a Nigerian music subculture.  A fusion genre of music that combines elements of afrobeats, dancehall, reggae, hip hop, and alternative R&B.  He has apparently had great success on TikTok and has leveraged that into a brand called OVMBR.  I will say that when he slows down the sound, it sort of reminds me of that low-key whiny phase that Drake can give.  He released lots of EPs to get started, and honestly they are not very popular.  His first track with more than a million streams was a 2019 single about police brutality.  His first album was 2020's OVMBR: Roses, and the top track on there is "24/48" with 6.9 million streams.

Not nearly as good as his later stuff.  Just more of a straight up R&B song where the africa beat pops in half-way in, but isn't really carrying the song.  His biggest track was a 2023 single with someone called brazy, "Be Easy" with 64.7 million streams.

I am still hearing Drake vibes.  His second album is 2023's Thoughts I Never Said, and it's top single is another introspective-sounding R&B song without the afrobeats.  I don't love it - "Into (Landmine)."  Instead, let's go with the significantly more fun top single off of his 2024 EP called Sunday at Zuri's - "Soh-Soh" has 34.5 million streams and that Sade vibe I mentioned before.

Summertime vibes all over that one.  I probably won't go out of my way to catch this show.  I will definitely say that letting his songs just stream while I got work done today was a nice vibe, but when I dig in and listen more intently, I'm not that excited about it.