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Thundercat: It Is What It Is review – love, loss and hyper-speed star jumps

Few virtuoso jazz bassists could a spend a decade in a legendary thrash punk band and then swap all the shredding to tour with Snoop Dogg, purveyor of languid west coast hip-hop. It’s a rare musician, too, who can combine writing songs for his cat, Tron, with picking up a Grammy for their sterling work with Kendrick Lamar, the finest rapper of his generation.

This is a really narrow field of one, occupied by 35-year-old Los Angelean Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, freak-funk polymath, anime obsessive, heir of sorts to the spacey Afro-futurism of George Clinton, a man who “may be covered in cat hair”, as he sings on Dragonball Durag, one playful single off his fourth album, but “still smells good”. The song’s video sees Haim, R&B singer Kali Uchis and the US comedian Quinta Brunson turning the deluded Bruner down, despite his fetching bandana (the titular “durag”), manga shorts and signature leopard-print ear muffs.

Back in 2017, Thundercat (his name is also a Dragon Ball Z reference) released his breakthrough third album, Drunk. It was a record that catapulted Bruner out of muso renown and into qualified fame. His reach was already broader than that of most musicians, thanks to that stint in Suicidal Tendencies and his work with Lamar, Erykah Badu, Earl Sweatshirt, Childish Gambino and his own close childhood friends Flying Lotus and Kamasi Washington, with whom he shared teenage jazz bands. But Bruner’s work began rippling more widely still. By way of example, one of his tunes – Them Changes – was covered by Ariana Grande in Radio 1’s Live Lounge a couple of days before the death, in 2018, of Mac Miller, who was Grande’s ex and Bruner’s close friend.

Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat finds him meditating on the loss of Miller and embracing the multiple, contradictory strands of his art. On It Is What It Is – the title sighs at the normalisation of loss – what “it” is varies wildly. Thundercat can be dense, goofy, comedic or desperately sad. This is an album very much about how to coexist with grief. The track Miguel’s Happy Dance suggests dancing, however bad you feel. A hazy, 52-second song called Existential Dread gives instructions on how to survive a panic attack, recalling Tame Impala as much as it does any of Bruner’s idols. “As long as I keep breathing I know I’ll be all right,” he croons in falsetto; cicadas chirp in the distance.

Another song, Black Qualls, finds Thundercat voicing the anxiety brought on by success and a modicum of money. “No more living in fear,” Bruner self-soothes. The lovely Fair Chance, a tender bromantic ode, mourns Miller. “We were just getting lifted yesterday,” Bruner boggles, audibly shaking his head. Rappers Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B guest.

In these 40 jam-packed minutes are some of Bruner’s most pop-facing tunes yet, where the epic sadness is counterbalanced with levity. Funny Thing is a slapping electro-funk party tune just shy of two minutes long that would be a hit if Thundercat allowed it to swell. Ditto Overseas, an early 80s smooth-funk track in which the blithe lothario-figure – who appears again in Dragonball Durag – imagines trysts in various exotic locations and joining “the mile-high club”.

Thundercat may record all his vocals alone, but his albums stress interconnectedness. If Bruner is a loyal friend, he is equally keen to showcase influential figures and bit-part players. (He did the same on Drunk, a record that unexpectedly embraced Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan, and Kenny Loggins).

Steve Arrington was at one time the singer in the funk band Slave, active in the early 80s; he guests on Black Qualls, alongside Steve Lacy, guitarist from the Internet – three generations of performers united by very distinct takes on funk. At the other end of the scale, I Love Louis Cole is a paean to partying with an obscure Los Angeles funk mischief-maker; Bruner’s sweet vocal floats hazily above a pulverising workout by drummer Louis Cole and Bruner’s own fingers, working his custom six-string bass to the core.

The track-listing also finds ample time for these more dense jazz-funk fusions – hyper-speed snippets like How Sway, where Bruner reminds listeners he isn’t from the mainstream, he’s just visiting from somewhere altogether gnarlier. It all makes for an album that gently weeps, then does a set of star jumps. Bruner’s quick mind and faster fingers dash off on tangents, never quite exploring his grooves to their fullest extents.

The drawback here is not that Bruner hasn’t made the out-and-out pop album his narrative arc as an artist might demand. Nor is it that he is showcasing his conservatoire-grade talents. It is, perhaps, that he doesn’t sit with one emotion, be it high or low, for a sustained length of time. When the title track glides in, at a luxurious five minutes (even if it is in two parts), you wish Thundercat had given all his ideas the benefit of the album’s title – It Is What It Is. You wish for a record that allowed Bruner to do less and just… be.