For one to title their album Planet of The Ape$ might make someone think that you are in for an apocalyptic, cinematic type of journey through sound with GREATeclectic as the director. That’s not entirely untrue. You’re definitely going on a ride, but it’s smoother and more familiar than one might have anticipated. DJ and artist, GREATeclectic serves as more of a Jack Hanna character guiding the listener through a concrete jungle.

The psychedelic eroticism on songs like “Heartbeat” featuring vocals by Karima Harrison (Noot D’ Noot) serve as pit-stops on the digital safari that is Planet of The Ape$. The effort has an infectious smoothness that you can’t deny and makes the more avant-garde musicality of everything surrounding the lyrics easier to swallow (pun, intended). “Yellow Gran Torino” sounds like something plucked straight out of Top 40 Radio from 1978, and it just feels good for no reason.

If there ever was such a thing as altruistic music, this would be it. Some songs are more adventurous like “Nu Africa” that finds female rapper, Corrine Stevie, boasting about how many gangsters she knows and how she likes to text her lover. She returns tenderer on the song, “Home (I Think about You).” She raps, “Tagging on the streets, just for the love of art.” That lyric explains the entire sentiment of the mixtape. Planet of the Ape$ is simply for the love of art and the desire to create, nothing less and if you feel something more, GREATeclectic isn’t taking responsibility. Each artist has made their niche in this distinctive planet that GREATeclectic has been so kind to let us journey into. Some places feel dangerous like the high-energy, vocoder-laden, Jay Scott-controlled dance floor anthem, “Light$.” “Bea$t” is the softer sister song to “Light$,” but with just as much attitude and danger present in the music. Think if The Eurythmics and Lisa, Lisa & The Cult Jam decided to do a duet, it’s that addictive and seductive.

Planet of the Ape$ creeps in your ear like something new, but on further investigation you can hear the inspiration and the more vintage references as the album has deep roots in downtown, New York in the 1990’s. I’m talking Larry Levan. I’m talking Paradise Garage. It’s probably 2012, but it could very well be 1992. GREATeclectic has curated a tour de force of youthful sounds and ideas, and has consequently made a whole new planet out of his creativity, just in time for Earth’s eminent apocalypse. We just have to learn to share it with a lot of great music and a few primates.

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