Sation: Sacramento’s New BFF
Station
Best Friend Ever
By Tim Stiles
Best Friend Ever is not a breath of fresh air.
It is not a new, bar-setting record or an attempt to cross genres and make a new sound “cause no one’s tried it before.”
This is hip-hop. This is an artist being honest, earnest, and truthful. This is Eric Goodman, AKA Station.
Across the album’s twenty tracks, there are recurring elements that define Station’s sound, the most obvious being the extensive use of
1970-era electric guitar, stuttering Rhodes attacks, 1950’s horn
sections, and time-compressed female vocal drones.
Making it a rule to use only samples from 1958 through 1982, Station is anything but lazy. His minimalist drum programming is a compliment to the instrumentation he lays on top. He isn’t cutting and pasting a couple of measures over breaks. You can tell he takes his time to make sure every piece of percussion is evenly matched to precise sample cuts and poignant bass lines played with a “crappy Costco keyboard.”
Because of this attention to detail, Best Friend Ever never loses the listener’s focus. It’s like that party in your head that goes on in the coffee shop line –the anticipation of what’s coming next.
In a nutshell, Station just might be the Sacramento hip-hop scene’s new best friend ever.