At first glance, Outasight’s Figure 8 EP looks like a Ray-Ban advertisement. The cover features a suited young man sporting the iconic eyewear in three photos.
Outasight, otherwise known as Richard Andrew, is officially sponsored by Pepsi and Warner Brothers Music, but his record label must have mixed up their product placement contracts on the day of the photo-shoot.
For a moment, it seemed that WB Music wasn’t making a sick, twisted joke. Might they have been suggesting not only that Andrew’s stage name implies that his tunes are “out of sight,” in a vernacular sense, but also that he, himself, is “out of sight,” that is, sightless, like the famous, sunglass-wearing musicians Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder?
Andrew isn’t blind literally, but Mr. Outasight is clearly blind to the idea of musical innovation.
Every song on the 5-track EP blandly regurgitates some style that recently topped the Billboard charts. In “So What,” Andrew’s indistinct voice croons nonsense over funk-rock guitars most likely ripped from the last Red Hot Chili Peppers record. In “Figure 8,” he raps shallowly on top of a half-time hip-hop grove built of poppy electric piano and mind-numbing stabs of wobbly bass.
Combine one of these vocal styles with any Top 40 genre and you’ve described one of the album’s final three tracks.
Spiritless and derivative, Figure 8 is best explained by its obvious pandering to potential corporate sponsors and best left to middle schoolers, on roller-skating rinks and in your nearest dumpster.
