The cover art is a photo taken by Melody Often, designed by Emily Slaughter (HWF/AK Slaughter), with font by Nolen Strals (Double Dagger/Post Typography). The image transcends the idea of infinite beginnings, much like the blues, hip hop, rock, soul, pop, country, pop and R&B plucked from everything and tossed into the mix.

It’s clear this one begins before the roots. The idea of Height with Friends has always embodied community in a way that music in Baltimore nurtures, and this is the story of a hip hop group being heard from within.

Press

“We’ve been a fan of Height’s beats for a while now, and there’s no indication of that changing.” – Weekly Tape Deck

“This is very much a continuation of the sound and format of the first Height With Friends album, last year’s Baltimore Highlands, although I think it might also be a refinement and improvement on it.” Al Shipley, Government Names

“With a little help from his Friends, Height has crafted a real stunner.

Bed of Seeds is the culmination of a process that began when Height with Friends isolated themselves in the woods of Western Maryland, focusing on new beginnings. This is a necessary process for any artist to go through from time to time, especially those dealing with the modern maze of making beats and rocking rhymes.

Why? The game right now is being strangled by too-high clearance fees for samples and a Cash-Monied army of Cat-in-the-Hat rhymers content to imitate as opposed to innovate. Height fights back by rapping about actual cats and zoned dreams, cavalcade lagoons and houses in a state of duress. The entire sampling issue is sidestepped by the crew doing it for themselves mostly, the audio of others used only sparingly. The result? A new foundation, from the ground up.

This is dangerous. When rap meets rock, the results can really fall flat, new dangers being exposed by the wizards of poetry as they fail to capture the boom- bap. This is unfortunate and interesting, considering the shared lineage and general exchange of sonic ideas that the two camps engage in. Why is that you can sample Billy Squier’s “Big Beat” and make a hot track, but a 2010 replication just won’t make the head nod?

Discussion will continue on this contentious point, but one needs to listen to Bed of Seeds and just hear Height and Emily and Mickey and Travis and Gavin. Instead, will it be too easy to get tripped up in the production style, their challenging choice to rhyme over music that owes more to Motown and Doo-wop than it does to Swizz Beats and Scott Storch? What is more important, content or context?

Look… just put the needle on the record, okay? When it all comes together (and it does and then some on the club banger “Link Wray”), you are in it to win it, the Friends forming like Voltron to kill the game, winterize it, marinate it. You nod your head and go “damn.” As a single song, “Link Wray” thumps and hums and makes you want to act a fool. You don’t care where the beat came from. A dope beat is a dope beat.

There is no doubt that Bed of Seeds is an Album with a capital “A”, a conceptual affair, a 30 minute journey that is a stylistic companion to the last Height with Friends effortBaltimore Highlands. Now we are at the next level, the footing more solid on the new terrain forged on the last release.

Height beckons, waiting for us to catch up with him, to join him in his new now next. There are no rules written that can’t be broken. Are we ready to take this trip?

This bed of seeds has been carefully tended and the seeds have borne fruit. The sky is the limit. I was down from my first listen to my twentieth…” – Kim Tabara, Beatbots