Glue
It happened by accident on a breezy winter afternoon in a residential pocket of Cincinnati. I was in town visiting a friend of a friend and, after I entered a nearby independent record store by the name of Shake It, something wafting from the quaint music shop’s speakers caught my attention.
I was so intrigued by the music I heard that I tracked down an employee, one of those meek yet matter-of-fact types that every indie record store has at least four of—you know, the ones who should be granted honorary Ph.D.s from major universities for their downright appalling recall of all things music. I asked this musical sage what it was that was playing on the in-house stereo on that particular windy afternoon, as I couldn’t leave the store without having learned. I was soon told that the music playing was that of the gentleman in Glue.
Not too many weeks after returning to Ypsilanti, I received a yellow envelope in the mail containing the Midwest-based hip-hop trio’s 2003 disc “Seconds Away.” I gave the 18-track album a thorough listen very shortly after opening it up, and this time around, I was more impressed than I was initially.
“Seconds Away” lays out a diversified and soul-driven approach to hip-hop that is as captivating as it is free-spirited. Between the record’s stirring opener (“And the Spider Sung”) and its hypnotically tight closer (“Haunt”—which easily out-jams almost anything that’s appeared atop the Billboard rap charts within recent memory), spins a whirling world of eclectic and entrancing sounds.
Here, decisive lines between tracks are erased, and their shavings are blown aside and lost in the rumble and majesty of the Glue cyclone. “Winners Never Sleep” cracks into three distinctively independent chunks while maintaining a cohesive and provocative sound current. “Mixing Excuses” and “No Helping” are subdued yet gripping slow jams. “Sock Drawer Blues” bounces amid a lace-tight acoustic deluge, and “Hand In the Sea” is a breezy slice of swinging jazz instrumentalism. The album is energetic, haunting, infectious, inspiring and essential.
Glue—as a grouping of three gents, not a mere collection of tunes—consists of Adeem (the group’s 26-year-old MC and two-time winner of the prestigious hip-hop competition Scribble Jam, in which he beat Slug of the lauded hip-hip act Atmosphere in 1998), Maker (beat composer) and DJ DQ.
The trio had humble beginnings and came together almost entirely by chance. Adeem, as his story goes, was spending a great deal of time in his quaint hometown of Keene, N.H., before he met either of his groupmates, both of whom lived hundreds of miles away from him at the time. Adeem met DJ DQ during a stint in Cincinnati in which he was filling in on-stage for a friend whose group was slated to open a show for DQ’s turntable entourage Animal Crackers. Shortly after, DQ packed his bags and relocated to Keene to collaborate with Adeem full time.
Adeem met the Chicago-based Maker in a similarly incidental way, getting a hold of him after hearing about the grassroots producer’s talent. Adeem found himself collaborating with both Maker and DQ shortly after. “Seconds Away” had its humble beginnings in a smoke and insomnia drenched room in Maker’s mother’s house, according to the album’s liner notes.
“It was all basically by chance,” Adeem said during a recent interview with the Echo.
In honor of the group’s completely haphazard birth as a musical entity, Glue’s soon-to-be-released new album will be titled “Catch as Catch Can”—a phrase describing a situation in which something positive results from a chance occurrence.
Glue, whose live show consists of just Adeem and DQ, played the overwhelming majority of the dates on the rabidly embraced Warped Tour last year. The group booked extra shows in the evenings and traveled 19,000 miles in a Honda Civic. According to Adeem, the two put 65 shows under their belts in the course of only four months.
Adeem explained why Maker typically avoids traveling with the group.
“Maker is a real big guy, and usually we’re traveling around in [equipment-filled] cars that aren’t so big,” he said. “So he usually just stays home.”
On the topic of playing the mainly punk-oriented Warped Tour as part of a relatively obscure hip-hop outfit, Adeem had nothing but positive things to say.
“It was an amazing experience,” he said. “You’re put in a situation where nobody really gives a shit about you and nobody came to see you. That really taught me you have to go out no holds barred and get people’s attention. ... It did amazing things for me as a performer and a person.”
According to Adeem, Glue’s live show is very “Tenacious D-esque”—putting all of the verbal pressure on him while the typically tight-lipped DQ spins quietly at his side.
While DQ and Adeem make equally integral contributions to “Seconds Away,” it should be noted that Maker’s beats on that album are almost entirely sample-based. This means that aside from DQ’s DJ work and Adeem’s words, almost every sound on that album has been picked up from other recordings, picked apart in a computer program and put back together again.
“All of us are all about old records and just finding samples on them that people have never heard,” Adeem said. “You can pull things off of records and put them into programs where you can resequence them. You get the original sound, [but] you can cut it and paste it back together so that it almost makes something totally new.
Glue’s sampling technique opens up the full catalog of known instruments and affords the group virtually endless auditory options. This and Glue’s tendency to frequently shift mood throughout “Seconds Away” creates a listening experience that runs the harmonic and emotional gamut. While deep, sweeping tracks such as “No Helping” and “Mixing Excuses” seem entrancing and personal, bouncy songs like “Jumpy In Lily” and “Elbow Room” shift gear into something almost like party music.
“I’m definitely not trying to make my music for hip-hop kids or rock kids,” Adeem said. “I’m just trying to make music for the person who listens to everything, and I hope that comes across.”
Glue’s new record “Catch as Catch Can” will be released by Shake It Records this spring.
