Dwele - "A Few Reasons (Truth Pt. 2)" (mp3)

You gotta feel for Dwele a little bit. Last year he got the biggest exposure of his career when Kanye West featured him on a big hit, "Flashing Lights," but then Kanye managed to shoot 3 different videos for the song, none of which had a role for the guy who sang the hook. I can't imagine he's mad about that, though, Dwele seeming like such a deliberately low key guy. I was never real into his voice (or, at least, I hated that chorus he did on Slum Village's "Tainted," which was the first thing I ever heard him on), but considering how much I've been into albums by Erykah Badu and Raheem DeVaughn, apparently I'm a good audience for hippie R&B right now, and Dwele's latest, Sketches Of A Man is sounding pretty good to me.

Dwele is always a restrained presence, with smooth, mannered vocals and a persona that comes off as level-headed and strangely dispassionate for a soul singer. Even on the album's clubbiest track, "Body Rock," he spends half a verse explaining how anal retentive he is about people smoking inside his car. And while Dwele's similarly mellow production style is confident and detailed, I can't help but gravitate toward the one track produced by one of my favorite current beatmakers in rap, Nottz. "A Few Reasons (Truth Pt. 2)" is a sequel to a song from Dwele's first album, but it bangs way harder than that or anything else on the new album, with a beat so nice that I can almost overlook terrible Zeitgeist-chasing lyrics like "if we had computer love, I would let you hack my MySpace/ if my love was a dance, you could YouTube it." Almost.

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