Kaidi Tatham is an artist from Belfast who has been active since the ‘90s, first becoming well known for his work with groups like Bugz in the Attic and The Herbaliser. He’s been working as a solo artist for about the last fifteen years, but he’s really been hitting his stride in the last few years, with brilliant solo albums like It’s a World Before You and In Search of Hope, as well as collaborative projects like Sankofa Season with Andrew Ashong. His most recent solo album, An Insight to All Minds, came out a little over a year ago, but we’ve already gotten two EPs since that time. Now he’s back with another solo album, Don’t Rush the Process.

It’s ironic for an artist like Kaidi Tatham to release an album called Don’t Rush the Process, since we’ve gotten a variety of brilliant and sophisticated project from him all in a short time frame. That said, we don’t always know how much work is going on behind the scenes, and how long each individual project is on the burner before it’s actually finished. It’s just from the listener’s angle, it feels like the musical ideas keep flowing from Tatham. Case in point, on this album, we get some of Tatham’s most wide reaching and beautiful compositions to date, covering ground that moves from instrumental downtempo hip hop to broken beat to electro-boogie to jazz-fusion to psychedelic and beyond. It’s an album where you just need to press play and then just sit down and listen and absorb all of the musical ideas that Tatham is weaving together, and just trust that he can navigate you through this journey. What makes an album like this especially impressive is that Tatham is wearing so many different hats, from songwriter to producer to multi-instrumentalist, making it sound like he has a tight jazz ensemble that can also throw down some funky hip hop and house beats, maybe work in some Latin rhythms, and also keep things really tight and focused. On top of all this, Tatham manages to make it an incredibly beautiful listening experience, with lush instrumentation and melodies that will stick in your head for days.

Don’t Rush the Process is another excellent album from one of our best living instrumental artists in Kaidi Tatham. He manages to keep pushing himself to experiment and bring different genres together, creating some gorgeous melodies and complex, danceable rhythms in the process.