It’s hard to feel sexy these days.
2025 was screeching tinnitus all the time, was a tsunami-warning klaxon every five minutes. 2026 is workmen sawing through the pavement just outside your window at five in the morning, except that five AM feeling lasts all day. 2026 is cinema zombies clacking and grinding their teeth. The clacking is in your right ear, the grinding in your left. Constantly. That’s not sexy. That’s not sexy at all.
With his new LP Street Druid in tow, premium sax honker Ben Vince is here to help bring sexy back in 2026. Well, sort of. And yeah, he’s about a week late to save us from a Valentine’s of fleece sweatpants, day-old pizza, and obscure winter sports, but hey, nobody’s perfect.
Now, admittedly, with a title like a Shadowrun archetype and a dowsing rod on the cover, Vince’s first solo LP since 2019 doesn’t exactly scream silk blindfolds and chocolate-dipped strawberries. And to be fair, ‘Sentient Kinetics’ and ‘(Ride A) Wave’ live up to the “street samurai running a job in Seattle’s Ork Underground” vibe of the album title. With their urgent, ping-ponging, cyberpunk dub beats and sax bleats, they call to mind peak Bokeh Versions releases like Jay Glass Dubs’s Epitaph (which not coincidentally featured Vince). These two longish cuts amount to about thirty percent of the record, but we can forgive an extended detour into the awakened world of post-2039 Seattle when the jams hit this hard. That other seventy percent, though? Pure steam. It kinda begs the question: What if Kenny G were unironically really good?
I’m not being glib or (entirely) unserious. As a listener, I’ve been invested in Vince for a while. One of our great sax collaborators along with folks like Chris Duffin and Bendik Giske and Jack Wyllie, Vince elevates any project or artist he works with. Check out EP/64-57 or his LP with Cucina Povera if you need citations. Here, he generally pivots away from the airier, more overtly ‘experimental’ compositions of his previous namesake LP, Don’t Give Your Life, in favour of a humid, dubwise, beachfront earthiness. Sea and sand intermingled. When working within this space, he focuses heavily on building mood, his repeating horn phrases intertwining with one another, languidly looping through and around drum patterns and synth strings, wah-wah guitar and loverman bass. The mood is sultry, genuinely sexy as hell without being cliché or corny. And Vince sustains it! Even when the title track introduces the sort of unintelligible semi-chanted vox my partner lovingly calls “monk shit”, it’s somehow increasing the ambient sensuality of the room by a factor of Sade. Pure sax seduction.
Now, it’s possible that through all this talk of street samurai and lovermen, I’ve left you with the impression that this is an un-unified album of bifurcated vibrations, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Street Druid flows seamlessly from the gentleness of ‘Peace Spell’ to ‘(Ride A) Wave’ to the near lullaby of closer ‘Longville’. Throughout it all, even during the record’s most intense passages, there’s an omnipresent tenderness and a certain sense of hope and wonder. Maybe even optimism. Which might be the sexiest thing of all. And if it is true that Side B of this thing is better suited to a rowdy tabletop gaming sesh than it is to romancing, that’s fair enough. After all, Shadowrunners need love, too.
