The Daily Spin, June 30
Jai Paul | Leak 04-13 [Bait Ones]
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) (2013)
Artist: Jai Paul
Link:
Jai Paul is, if you ask me, music’s greatest what-if story.
The British producer exploded onto the scene in 2011 with BTSTU, exploring the mesh of electronica, RnB, jazz, hip-hop, and sampling in a fusion that had never been seen before quite like this - innovative at its core, deeply enticing, and wholly exciting across the entire world of music. He followed it with 2012’s Jasmine, another venture into the unknown, the sort of sleek, cat-like production that mystified and entranced. People took notice - he was sampled by Drake and Beyonce among others, landed a spot with XL Records, and seemed to be on the precipice of something fantastic with his first album, to be titled Bait Ones.
Unfortunately, the album was leaked in April 2013 on Bandcamp, with Paul and XL releasing statements in short order confirming that it wasn’t supposed to happen - with every track on the album carrying an unfinished or demo moniker, save for track 8: ‘good time’, a 27-second ditty.
Following those statements and the leak, Jai Paul disappeared - for six years. Obviously, I don’t fault him one iota, because if my long-heralded debut was stymied by an unknown force that chose to publish my incomplete work through a lack of patience, I’d be incredibly angry, but it does stand out to me as one of the great questions - what could he have accomplished if allowed to flourish at the highest level, as he deserved? So much of his music feels experimental and ahead of its time now, in 2023, and we’re talking about songs that are a decade old at this point!
In 2019, Paul returned in a major way with two new songs - ‘He’ and ‘Do You Love Her Now’, gorgeous tracks that display a lot of the polish that comes with the opportunity to finish a song, but the bigger splash was the appearance on streaming services and platforms of an album, titled Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) - after six years, it was finally available in full. Unfinished, unpolished, and devastatingly excellent in every single way.
A few weeks ago, Preston Pack (of the Wild Pitch, who reviews these albums with myself and co-collaborator Eli Powell) noted that of all the ratings above 5.5, the one score I hadn’t yet given was a 9.9, and it left me thinking about what sort of album would merit a score like, to come so close to tasting perfection yet fall just that tiny bit short - and unwittingly, I think I had given myself an answer.
Bait Ones, despite that lack of polish, is an incredible album, and as mentioned, it only leaves me wondering what it could be with that last bit of finishing touch that Paul showed he’s capable of with his other work - when allowed to complete a track in its entirety, they’re generational tracks. Despite this, the album still feels remarkably complete - future funk, electronica, rip-saw synths and South Asian flavor all in one melting pot under Bollywood sampling to create music that feels so deliciously ahead of its time.
Usually, there are clear contenders for my favorite track on an album, but on this one, I can think of at least seven or eight that could easily be listed below. From the frantic pacing of ‘Genevieve’, that classically rough synth wailing like a rockstar’s guitar over dancing percussion, the classic story of love lost, to the slow-jam movements of ‘All Night’, the sort of song that plays those freeze-frame moments where you lock eyes with someone and feel that spark. It’s present in the ethereal vocals of ‘Desert River’, as a pounding synth-percussion duo hammers at your ears, the same way that ‘Vibin’ pulls so many of those RnB elements in under falsetto vocals, airy instrumentals floating away the way your head can when you feel that lightning-strike connection with someone.
Paul says it best on the album’s closer, BTSTU - “I know I’ve been gone a long time / I’m back and I want what is mine”. If nothing else, Bait Ones is a triumph in finding what was once lost, a reminder of what could have been, a testament above all else to stolen potential and unrealized promise, perfection truncated at the last gasp.
Rating: 9.9/10
Best Tracks: Jasmine, Genevieve, 100,000, BTSTU
Worst Tracks: raw beat