I feel like once a week I see an Instagram Reel captioned something like, “Berklee students be like,” showing a musician cheekily pulling off a seemingly impossible feat, fingers fluttering in a hummingbird-winged blur. Drummer/keyboardist combo DOMi & JD BECK embody that winkingly skillful spirit: They bring daredevil swagger to their meticulously refined chops, making jazz fusion at the intersection of conservatory discipline and madcap hijinks. It’s an equal-opportunity approach to virtuosity: Their changes are dense enough for music-theory YouTubers, approachable enough for the flat-white set.
NOT TiGHT, DOMi & BECK’s 2022 debut, channeled trad jazz fusion into a whirlwind of whimsy supported by a star-studded cast (Herbie Hancock, Thundercat, Anderson .Paak, Mac DeMarco), but they too often prioritized pyrotechnics over feeling. The extended chords radiated color, but despite the influence of hip-hop and video-game music, the playing felt less mischievous than relentlessly mechanical. On their second album, WHO ASKED?, the players opt to go it alone, forgoing the boldfaced features of their debut. They’re still making charged-up tunes full of breakneck rhythms, but the awkward funkiness of Drunk-era Thundercat has been replaced by twinkly, upbeat atmospheres and a chamber orchestra that sometimes conjures up Masashi Hamauzu’s work on the Final Fantasy series.
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The album’s mood is evocative of a hot summer’s day; the combination of live-wire drum breaks and breezy keys suggests the feeling of dipping your toes in the ocean when the temperature outside is pushing 90. “EXiT” captures the contradiction at the heart of their music: The playing is mathy, the melodies youthfully unburdened. The orchestra’s washed-out timbres smooth over quick transitions, and DOMi’s percussive celeste brings an ephemeral quality, giving the music an added degree of textural depth. In “CONCERTINO (FOR PiANO, DRUMS, & ORCHESTRA),” the duo’s frenzied interplay is cushioned by strings and woodwinds that linger in the air.
Where NOT TiGHT resembled a particularly kinetic beat tape, these pieces feel more like songs. That doesn’t mean they’re hummable, though. The duo’s vocal melodies mirror the rapid changes of the playing; nearly every syllable plots a new note on an already filled-in stave. Take “SOME THiNGS NEVER CHANGE,” whose melody is marked by awkward intervallic leaps. The antic delivery is at cross purposes with the song’s lyrics, which seem to be about anxiety in the face of climate change (“The ground is humming, pressure rising/Feels like both hands are tied”); the overall effect is restless and scattered.
Ironically, given the flashy playing and newly expanded palette, WHO ASKED? often feels frustratingly one-note across the album’s nearly hour-long runtime. DOMi’s maximalist playing rarely lets up, and the densely harmonized vocals and orchestra begin to grate. Compare “OUT OF SYNC,” “CLiMBING HiGH,” and “GROWiNG OLDER”: All three songs set cheery vocals and woodwinds against plasticky, lagging breakbeats, and no matter how technically proficient the playing, all those pastel hues begin to blur together.
Short and punchy, “LOVELY MASQUERADE” offers a welcome tonal shift, featuring a menacing synth bass that chugs atop BECK’s thumping, squarely positioned kicks. Its relatively skeletal form offers more space for the duo’s ideas to unfurl, and reveals the central problem weighing down the album: Despite their copious skills, DOMi & BECK haven’t yet learned when to let loose, when to pull back, and when just to hang.
