hip hop
Joe Muggs
Founded in 1998, the Los Angeles based Anticon collective has become one of the most curiously individual of 21st century groupings. Taking the wordiest and nerdiest tendencies of hip hop – notably the slam poetry-informed tongue-twisting of fellow Californians like Freestyle Fellowship and Blackalicious – and the wordiest and nerdiest tendencies of electronically enhanced psychedelic indie as their starting points, they built a world of introspection and frazzled wordplay that they still inhabit to this day via several dozen collaborative and individual projects.Why? was originally the stage Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Keith Thornton is a big deal in the hip hop community, having forged a 35-year career with the likes of the Ultramagnetic MCs and under pseudonyms like Dr Octagon and Kool Keith. To many, however, he is primarily the voice of the incendiary sample that drove the Prodigy’s magnificent “Smack My Bitch Up” single. Anyone still doubting Thornton’s position in the hip hop pantheon are treated to Kool Keith emphatically staking his claim throughout KEITH. A lyrical and beat collage that takes in social reportage on the menacing “95 South”, anti-materialism on “Word Life” and racism, it also has a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Don't let the presence of nerds' favourite Madlib on production duties fool you: this is a big bad bastard of a West Coast rap record. It's a cocaine-wholesaling, n-wording, gun-toting, dog-eat-dog-ing, murderous bastard of a rap record, in fact. The narratives are of jail cells, money laundering, betrayal and domination. When talk turns to politics, it's couched in terms of brutal power, paranoia and “puppetmasters”. Madlib's music is constantly oppressive, its crushing bass and dense mesh of samples and found sounds surrounding you like the most potent narcotic smoke, every detail painfully Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Martial arts mayhem, Shaolin philosophy, a tribe of masked hip hop warriors emerging from the mist of Staten Island, a Funkadelic-Parliament collective sprawling through the music industry in the age of black mass incarceration: the Wu-Tang Clan were all these things, immediately. Will Ashton’s new book, Chamber Music: About the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces), considers their 1993 debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) in provocative, cut-up, sample-heavy style. In conversation with the languidly learned, culturally sensitive journalist Kevin Le Gendre, he sets the Wu-Tang in a broad, often ugly Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's five years since Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus released an album, and it's not entirely clear how far he's moved creatively. To be fair he's been busy branching out in other directions, producing for superstar rapper Kendrick Lamar, making short films, and helping members of his Brainfeeder stable like Thundercat and Kamasi Washington along to greater fame. But with this album he seems to have taken up precisely where 2014's “Your Dead” left off. The same preoccupations are here: exquisite musicianship mashed together with deliberate decay and destruction, high falutin spiritual Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Now going for over a dozen years, ever-busier since Live Nation took over its parent company in 2015, The Great Escape Festival is the annual multi-venue band showcase and music conference which sees Brighton swamped with music biz sorts. This year these especially seemed to be young men and women called Piers and Hannah watching female-fronted indie bands. This writer only catches the last of the three days – Saturday – but is sucked into the venue-trawling spirit of the thing.Down on the seafront an encampment of marquees has appeared on the eastern end of Brighton beach, enclosing three Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When poetic London MC Loyle Carner first appeared a couple years ago he was hailed for his fresh take on UK hip hop. Compared to the street-centric machismo of much grime music, he offered a welcome insight into a more sensitive 21st century masculinity that was a hit with both arts media sorts and the public. His second album, named for a Stevie Smith poem, contains two songs titled after virtuoso chefs (“Ottolenghi” and “Carluccio”), and one dedicated to his mother. It will do nothing to dent this reputation for emotional articulacy.Carner doesn’t so much spit verses as let them flow out of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Impressively, this collaboration of three of pop's hardest grafters feels like a real group endeavour. Certainly, the multi-quintillion-selling Australian songwriter Sia's piercing tones and melodic style are the most recognisable thing here, but they weave around Hackney-raised Simon Cowell protege Labrinth's more understated voice and globally ubiquitous DJ/producer Diplo's military-grade Latin / dancehall / hip hop derived beats to create impressive coherence. It's not the trip-out the group name might suggest, but it's certainly got its share of odd twists, dizzying quick shifts and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Chemical Brothers just keep on coming. No Geography could as well be called No Surrender. It’s the sound of two men approaching 50 but still keenly attuned to making feet move on the dancefloor. Partly made using old synths relegated to a dusty corner since the duo’s defining first couple of albums, the pair’s ninth (tenth, if you count the sountrack to the 2011 film Hanna) is segued into a flowing whole and, as intended, sweeps the listener off on its beat-driven magic carpet ride.Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons’ initial success came on the back of gigantic hip hop drum-fuelled party tunes Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Everything about this mixtape oozes confidence. It crams 12 tracks plus interludes – all produced by Andre “Shy FX” Williams – into barely more than half an hour. It happily leaves “Roll the Dice”, the single which conquered club and radio and featured Lily Allen, until last. As well as roots reggae, carnival marching bands, lyrically and rhythmically brutal bashment and lashings of the drum'n'bass that Shy FX is best known for, it traverses creepy-crawling avant pop, modernist R&B and moody off-centre hip hop, yet never loses the sense of being a focused party soundtrack. And Read more ...
Katherine Waters
There’s a wolf howl and Yxng Bane (pronounced Young Bane) jumps off a block on stage and his furry hooded coat flies open and the arena erupts in screams. The pit is filled almost exclusively with seventeen year old girls, excellently contoured and sporting chunky trainers and crop tops like it’s the early 2000s all over again, and he’s wearing nothing underneath except many hours at the gym. The 22 year old musician from Canning Town has already shared the stage with the likes of Wiley, Tinie Tempah, Yungen and Shy FX - and it’s not just his music that’s got pull. He's not flirting with fame Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s been an odd year for albums. The one I’ve listened to most is Stop Lying, a mini-album by Raf Rundel, an artist best known as one half of DJ-producer outfit 2 Bears. It’s a genially cynical album, laced with love, dipping into all manner of styles, from electro-pop to hip hop, but essentially pop. It’s easy and likeable but also short, and didn’t seem to have the required epochal aspects for an Album of the Year.Two albums that do are Kali Uchis’ Isolation and Your Queen is a Reptile by Sons of Kemet. The first one, despite tacky cover art that looks like a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, Read more ...