355: lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to, by Various Artists

Various Artists
lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to (2017 onwards)
∞ tracks, ∞ minutes
Stream live on YouTube

lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to is one of the biggest musical phenomena of the past few years. It some ways, it represents a whole new paradigm of how and why people listen to music. And no, it’s not technically an album. If you’ve not yet been exposed to it, let me introduce you to the wonders of lofi hip-hop, compiled by ChilledCow:

I’ve been really excited to write about this, because there’s so much to talk about. Even the format that it takes is very much a 2010s thing: sort of a midway between an algorithmically-generated playlist and a curated radio station, a never-ending and continually updating set of tracks available 24 hours a day. There’s something I love about the infinite but unselectable nature of it. You don’t get to choose to only hear the tracks you know that you like, and you don’t get to skip any, but you can drop yourself in and out whenever you like. The tracks aren’t played in any specific order, but they are very carefully selected – a mix of the automated and the personal.

The music itself is a very specific genre with a very specific ambience. The name ‘lofi hip-hop’ may lead you to expect a little different to what it actually is. It’s an almost entirely instrumental style that is based around the marriage of off-kilter J Dilla-esque beats and samples often taken from relaxed jazz. The whole thing is chopped up and rearranged in a slightly surreal or hypnagogic way, and everything is treated with a production that makes it feel warm and fuzzy, cosy even, using vinyl-like surface noise, a strangely warped and wobbly feel to it, lots of shimmering and glittery timbres and a slow, steady tempo for ultimate chill-out vibes. Bassist, music theorist and YouTuber Adam Neely even looked into the way lofi hip-hop uses harmonies and unusual tunings and posited, very convincingly, that it has much more akin to a new field of jazz than hip-hop.

And for all its weird quirkiness, this isn’t some small niche, it is hugely popular. ChilledCow’s YouTube channel has over four million subscribers. At any given time, lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to has tens of thousands of listeners (at the time of writing – 3pm on a Saturday – it has over 19,000 people tuning in). Neither is it the only one: ChilledCow also runs lofi hip hop radio - beats to sleep/chill to (4,200 listeners right now), and there’s also the marginally differently-titled lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to (2,400 listeners), the festive 24/7 Christmas lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/chill/relax (1,200 listeners) and the list goes on. The music has the same atmosphere, the names are almost interchangeable and even the aesthetic of the artwork is precisely the same – a short looping animation of a cosy but cluttered anime bedroom with a sleepy protagonist relaxing/studying. What makes these so popular? The clue is in the name. These streams and the music within aren’t really used to be listened to as much as they are to be heard. They provide a background noise that’s meant to manipulate the listener’s thinking: the chilled, atmospheric sounds of the music are interesting enough to divert some attention while being relaxed and predictable enough to still ‘fade into the background,’ meaning that any distractions from the outside world are drowned out while still allowing the conscious brain to focus on something else. It’s perfect, then, to ‘relax/study to.’ For a lot of listeners, these lofi beats don’t even really register as ‘music’ at all; they don’t listen to it because they enjoy the music, they put it on because it fulfils a function and it works. There are two particularly interesting articles on this aspect of lofi hip-hop: one on JSTOR, which takes a positive view on it, and one in the New Yorker, which is much more negative, but I highly recommend both of them.

As that New Yorker article hints at, the popularity of this style of music has also had a backlash, with people angry at the musical movement for its perceived lack of musicality or creativity, for turning the noble art of music into insipid background noise fit only to be ‘used’ like a tool, and for just being plain boring. But it’s impossible to deny its success. For me, all of these reactions are really fascinating, from the music’s quiet but incredible popularity to the venom with which its detractors attack it. Personally, I actually really enjoy listening to the music, even in an engaged, ‘active’ capacity – I just think it’s chill.

As we reach the end of 2019 and get ready to roll on to a new decade, everywhere is full of retrospectives of the past ten years, everyone looking at the best, the most influential, the most definitive. I reckon that, regardless of anyone’s individual opinions on its merits or quality, the phenomenon of the lofi hip-hop YouTube stream as exemplified by lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to is one of the most iconic musical forces of the 2010s. It’s just not something that could have existed at any other time, and certainly not with the same amount of success.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to spend the last few days of the year writing intermittently in a notebook, wistfully looking out of the window with my plump ginger cat, feeling drowsy and listening to some slightly wonky but incredibly comfortable chill af beats.

340: Vengo, by Ana Tijoux

Ana Tijoux (Chile)
Vengo (2014)
17 tracks, 54 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

In rap, languages are all-important. If you’re not using language, you’re not rapping, you’re scatting. But there’s lots of languages, and they each have their own unique rhythms, melodies, structures and patterns inherent in them, meaning that some languages lend themselves to the technique of rap easier than others. I think this is probably a ‘your mileage may vary’ sort of thing based on your own personal aesthetic preferences and your ability to understand the actual lyrics being rapped. For example, I find German and Russian rap really unfulfilling in their flows, the syllables not really hitting my ear right. On the other hand, raps in Spanish and Arabic are delightful!

Which is one of the reasons why I love Ana Tijoux’s song ‘Somos Sur’ from her album Vengo so much. Tijoux is a Chilean rapper, born and raised in France before moving to Santiago de Chile as a teenager, where she learnt her chops on the mic. The Spanish language really suits her fairly staccato rap style, and then after a few verses, a treat: up steps Shadia Mansour, British-Palestinian singer and rapper giving a blistering verse in Arabic, filled with righteous anger and international solidarity among Tijoux’s anti-imperialist anthem. The two languages have very different aural profiles, but they sit together so well juxtaposed as raps on this absolute banger of a song.

The instrumental element of ‘Somos Sur’ is also top-notch, with reedy Latin saxophones and folkloric violins providing the main base alongside a driving beat, bass and squelchy, distorted synths, and with an elegant verse from Tijoux backed by a classical string quartet. The music across the whole album is similarly lush with diverse influences. You can tell it’s not going to be your standard hip-hop album when the very first track is opened by Andean quena flutes played in a traditional manner, over which the track’s groove is based around – it’s obvious that Tijoux set out to make a hip-hop album that could only have come from Chile.

Another thing that is genuinely impressive about Vengo is that it doesn’t contain any samples. All the sounds on this album were recorded specifically for it. The producers here aren’t constructing the music from various beds and layers taken from other tracks, they all act as arrangers, working with the musicians and piecing together each of the parts in a gloriously hands-on way.

The past 40 years have really made it clear that hip-hop – in all its elements of MCing, DJing, B-boying and graffiti – is a global language, but every language has its accents. With the mix of live sounds, Latin, indigenous and international influences, the amazing Arabic guest slot from Shadia Mansour and her own Spanish flows, Ana Tijoux’s hip-hop accent on Vengo is one of the most compelling around.

318: Power in Numbers, by Jurassic 5

Jurassic 5 (USA)
Power in Numbers (2002)
17 tracks, 56 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Record shops are great, aren’t they? Rooms filled to the brim with CDs and LPs and the like that you’re allowed – nay, encouraged! – to finger through, taking in the artwork and imagining what exciting new sounds are contained within. A good record shop will have albums of all sorts, laid out in a way to guide you on a voyage through a world of music as you stroll around. Go into the right shop in the right mind-set and you can come out with armfuls, each new record you pick up leading you to the next one. They’re also a great place to hear music – the soundscape of the record shop is usually controlled by its guardians, those shadowy entities that lurk by the tills.

That’s how I came across Power in Numbers. It was in the Manchester branch of Fopp, when that shop was still a small independent chain before they got bought out by HMV. They had the great combination of both a huge selection and cheap prices, and the music they pumped out into the shop was usually stellar, ensuring you’d always want to stay in there as long as possible. And so it was with this album: they played it all the way through. I was intrigued by the first track (not including the intro), hooked by the second, and I think I’d already bought the CD by the third. There’s no better way to sell an album than by showing people how good it is.

I think this is probably my favourite straight-up hip-hop album. J5’s whole thing is that they hark back to the old-school, and that really shines through in every aspect of Power in Numbers, from the rhythms of the MCs’ flows to the samples they use (an excellent array of funk, soul and jazz) to the topics they tackle. All of it has a gloriously vintage vibe, but at the same time they keep everything up-to-date and polished. Their sound is classic without smelling musty. It also helps that this album features stand-out performances by Chali 2na on almost every track. His deep baritone and simple but effective flow make him one of the most recognisable voices in hip-hop, and acts as a stable counterweight to the other members of the group, all the while shored up by the inspired and intelligent work of producers Cut Chemist and DJ Nu Mark.

Really, the best thing about this album is just how cool it is. Everything is laid back, even when the tempo speeds up. They deal with issues that are sometimes quite weighty, but they’re all approached from a more mature point-of-view, without undue excitement or hysteria. And the music itself is just the embodiment of that coolness – even if this album was entirely instrumental it would be a great soundtrack for strutting down the street in the sun or kicking back to chill. It’s not aloof either. The undisputed highlight is the track ‘A Day at the Races’; it’s completely next level stuff, and although it’s still as cool as the rest of the set, there is so much fun in it too.

For me personally, Power in Numbers always reminds me to keep my ears open and allow myself to be taken in by the unexpected. I probably didn’t go into Fopp that day expecting to come out with a hip-hop album, but hearing it played over the shop’s sound system made it an inevitability. Take a listen – how could you not?! It’s an all-round hit, and I owe a lot to a record shop for having it in my life. Bless those temples to recorded music – they may be teetering on endangered, but they’re really important to our musical ecosystem. Head down to your local record shop and discover something new today!

310: 12 bit Blues, by Kid Koala

Kid Koala (Canada)
12 bit Blues (2012)
12 tracks, 41 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The first time I’d heard of Kid Koala was through his remix of Yusef Lateef’s ‘Bamboo Flute Blues’ (you can hear that on YouTube here). It wasn’t your usual remix of changing bits of the song around, repeating bits and adding a new beat and synth-line to it. He’d turned the piece into an almost musique concrete. The original piece was sparse, led by the eponymous instrument with just small and subtle interjections by the double bass, piano and drums; Kid Koala’s remix kept it that way. The sounds used in the remix only come from the original track. They’re manipulated with some light delay or tremolo now and then, and he introduces his own personality to the piece by using the instruments as samples for his turntablism, but the mood and the feeling of the piece remained exactly the same as the 1965 recording. Not many DJs would approach that piece in that way. I knew there was something different about Kid Koala.

Then he released a blues album and I knew it was going to be special. 12 bit Blues is like that Yusef Lateef remix but on a much bigger scale: the sounds you hear on this album are from a shop's worth of vintage blues records, all chopped and changed and looped and stretched and morphed in various ways to create an album that is as much blues as it is instrumental hip-hop.

The whole album is made in the spirit of getting back to essentials. Just as he looks to early blues as a way to look back to the roots of American music, his music making process also goes back to the roots of modern hip-hop production. No computer software was used in the creation of the album; instead, every one of the hundreds of samples were painstakingly loaded up into an E-mu SP-1200 sampler so beloved of early hip-hop producers (and which works in 12 bit, hence the album’s title), and played back those samples live, building up multitrack layers of music. After these tracks were solidified, he added his own turntable scratches and cuts onto the top for extra flair. In this process, Kid Koala managed to find the middle-ground between the ultra-analogue world of the blues and heavily computerised world of contemporary hip-hop by ‘playing’ the samples as if they were a classic instrument of the blues.

The range of sounds and samples on display is astounding, and shows the passion and knowledge that Kid Koala holds for the blues. The album starts with a growling monologue from Son House and goes on to encompass so many different blues frames of reference: from pre-war country blues to Chicago boogie, from jump-blues to piano blues to early soul to full-on, balls-out, horn-led R’n’B. Consequently, the album’s mood is similarly broad, with some tracks being a riot of sound, and some more contemplative, but all made with care, joy and a tricksy spirit. With 12 bit Blues, Kid Koala succeeds in something that generations of people who tried to combine blues and hip-hop failed at – he managed to combine not just the music in an authentic and pleasing way, but also the personalities of the scenes in a way that would make total sense to both a hip-hop fan and a blues nut. It’s really impressive from a technical and emotional standpoint, and totally immersive from a musical one.

277: Hamilton: An American Musical, Original Broadway Cast Recording

Original Broadway Cast Recording (USA/Puerto Rico)
Hamilton: An American Musical (2015)
46 tracks, 142 minutes (2CD)
Spotify ∙ iTunes

For those that have never heard of Hamilton, it’s a hard sell. A sung-through hip-hop musical based on the life of a US Founding Father – Alexander Hamilton. It sounds ridiculous, and even typing that sentence I can hear in my mind the sort of dross that it would make me expect. Lucky for me, then, that I actually heard a couple of tracks from the show before it was explained to me.

Because – if you didn’t know by now – Hamilton is a revelation in the world of music theatre. It has won buckets of Tony Awards and Olivier Awards (including Best Musical and Best Actor in both) and many other theatre awards, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theatre Album (for today’s Good Album) and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s broken box office grossing records and tickets – on both Broadway and the West End – routinely go for silly money. Perhaps most impressive of all, it turned me, an avowed anti-musical-theatrist, not only into a huge fan of Hamilton itself, but has opened my ears to a world of art I had previously considered far removed from my own brainspace.

How did Miranda manage to turn such a corny premise into probably the hugest (small-m) musical phenomenon of the past decade? First off is the obvious quality of the music on offer. To hear the words ‘hip-hop musical’ is surely to cringe; a bunch of ‘theatre kids’ with their flamboyant overacting and cod New York Jewish accents, making semi-ironic and wholly-awful attempts at old school hip-hip-hippety-hop – argh, I get angry just thinking about it. But Lin-Manuel ain’t like that. He’s dyed in the wool, growing up immersed in the sounds of hip-hop of all styles, as well as musical theatre cast recordings, competing in ciphers as a kid and compulsively writing raps. Add that together with a genius brain for lyricism, drama and storytelling, and you get a musical based around hip-hop in an authentic and sympathetic way, with incredibly intelligent verses that convey huge amounts of narrative, emotion and personality in very limited space and absolutely dripping with witty wordplay and virtuosic rhetorical turn-arounds. The musical isn’t limited to hip-hop either, as listeners are taken on a journey through R’n’B, jazz, classical and standard showtune-type music as well.

Another thing that really helps the whole conceit is that the casting was made in a very conscious way – in the original Broadway cast that you hear on this album, all actors except one (the ridiculous figure of King George III, e.g. the oppressor) are played by people of colour. This allows the show to be approached in a different frame-of-mind than otherwise, bringing to the fore different themes and connections to the present day – and manages to disguise the fact that, at its core, it is a story about the entangled lives of a million mostly-rich white men, as history typically focuses on at the expense of basically anyone else. It also allows for the casting of actors with very different skill sets than might normally be found in a story such as this.

Even divorced from the play itself, this original cast recording stands up as a Good Album and a rewarding listen in and of itself. The cast is made up, as you can expect, of amazing performers, from Miranda himself as Alexander Hamilton, Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler and, for me the stand-out voice of the whole thing, Daveed Diggs as the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. Diggs is a well-known alternative hip-hop artist in his own right, and he brings that to his roles with amazing results – his rapid-fire verse in the song ‘Guns and Ships’ is the fastest in Broadway history, averaging at 6.3 words a second, and each of them clear as a bell. Add in the fact that the whole album was produced by ?uestlove and Black Thought from The Roots, and the musical pedigree is outstanding. The story is just as affecting as on stage, too. The first time I listened through to this album, I was completely hooked in a way that, paradoxically, made me stop listening to it. I was so engaged in the story and enthralled by the music that at the end of the first act, I had to put it down – I wanted to make sure I could listen to the second half of the performance in a way that I could devote to it my full attention…and also, I didn’t want it to be over so soon. After I had finished that first listen through, on a sunny bumble around Brighton, with my heart having been wrenched several times by the multiple tragedies of the piece, I had to just sit down and reflect in silence. It was incredibly moving. Just how Miranda could read an epic-length and very dry biography of Hamilton and pull from that this intensely emotional, funny and downright badass hip-hop musical is simply astounding.

I’ve extolled Hamilton a lot here (can you tell I’ve been waiting a long time for this one to come up on this blog?), and I think it would be remiss to not at least mentions its faults. Some are understandable, such as a few fairly major historical inaccuracies that are bound to occur in the context of making a neat and compelling two-act story. Some are less so: the criticisms of slave-owning Founding Fathers are a little too subtle – or perhaps, too gentle; the construction of an ‘immigrant’ narrative around Hamilton as an analogue to today’s immigrant experience when he was actually just a white guy who moved from one British colony to another when he was a teenager; and the co-opting of an art-form of the oppressed to sing the songs of the oppressors are a little less excusable. It is important that we don’t allow the impressiveness and wokeness of some aspects of the show to blind us to some of its more problematic elements.

Nevertheless, I remain in awe of Hamilton. Since discovering this album, I’ve not only gone on to see the show at the West End twice (simply amazing, of course, see it asap!), but I’ve also been to see several others that I don’t think I would have if I hadn’t had my eyes and ears opened by this one. Yes, ‘a sung-through hip-hop musical based on the life of a US Founding Father – Alexander Hamilton’ sounds rubbish. But if you’re at all a fan of good music and you’ve not given it a go yet, at least take a listen to the opening song and let it blow away your expectations and keep you listening for the rest of the show.

258: Brand New Second Hand, by Roots Manuva

Roots Manuva (United Kingdom)
Brand New Second Hand (1999)
17 tracks, 65 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

You know that as much as I enjoy hip-hop, it’s not exactly a sphere that I’m most well-practiced at writing within. I know well what I enjoy and can analyse why certain aspects may appeal to me more than others, but I am very aware that there are many cultural nuances and inter-references that I’m missing just by virtue of not being as immersed in that scene as I am in some others. And it happens that most of my favourite hip-hop artists are from the US… so when it comes to UK hip-hop, I’m ashamedly even more in the dark. I am certain that there are many, many artists, sub-genres, distinct regional scenes, narratives and other complicating factors that I am just not aware of at all and that necessarily would hamper my ability to comment intelligently on any portion of the UK hip-hop scene. But Roots Manuva is an artist that I really dig, and Brand New Second Hand, while not being my first exposure to him (that was on this great track by Ty), was the first time I really got to dive into his work and appreciate it as a body of art. So when I did my research for this entry and found out that this album is considered a classic and high-water mark for UK hip-hop, I can’t help but feel a little relieved that at least my instincts were right, even if I may not know the most about it.

What I love the most about this album is established immediately from the beginning of the first track and keeps it up for the whole thing: it’s the combination of the instrumental production, the flow of Roots Manuva’s raps and the unique timbre of his voice; in short, then, it’s the sound of it all.

The production obviously plays a big part in this. Even though there are seven producers across the whole album, it all sounds incredibly coherent, as each of the tracks share the same darkly atmospheric vibe. A lot of the music is very minimalist; it’s not out-of-place for tracks to simply comprise of a lo-fi drum loop, a slow sample and Roots Manuva doing his thing over the top. Even when the texture is fuller, such as in the track ‘Soul Decay’, the samples used and the simplicity of the beat highlight the starkness of it all. This works particularly effectively on the ‘Shifting Sands’, where the sample comes from Miles Davis’ masterpiece of unsettling atmosphere Bitches Brew, and on the closer ‘Motion 5000’, where live violin and cello add a sadness and longing to the already complex emotionscape.

The instrumental atmospheres are ideal groundings for Roots Manuva’s wordsmithery. His voice is gentle and low-pitched and his delivery is calm. His rhythms aren’t the most complicated and performed at an easy pace that makes it clear that it is the words and meanings that are of importance above flashy shows of intense technicality. His flow is reminiscent of both old-school New York rap and Jamaican ragga, amalgamating the two but being absolutely uncompromising in the use of his own voice; Roots Manuva is a South Londoner of Jamaican heritage, and that accent informs his rhythms, inflections and melodic cadences in a way that stamps his identity indelibly on the music. His delivery is also at times strongly suggestive of spoken word poetry, and his lyrics reflect that. Not for him are the trivial concerns of bling, rep and glorified violence; he instead focuses on deeper subjects of reflective autobiography, religion and solemn advice for sharpening consciousness and embracing a fulfilling life, as well as addressing political factors that make the UK much less conducive of such a lifestyle, particularly for black men and boys.

So those are my little thoughts on Brand New Second Hand by Roots Manuva. I hope I have not mangled its meanings, importances or profundities too much by my ignorance of the UK hip-hop scene from which it grew and went on in turn to deeply impact. If you, dear reader, have any recommendations for UK hip-hop branching off from this starting point, please do share them here. There is a whole world of music of which we can only just scratch the surface, but we can certainly guide each other to the richest seems to mine together.

245: Seize the Time, by Fun^da^Mental

Fun^da^Mental (United Kingdom/Pakistan)
Seize the Time (1994)
14 tracks, 84 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

From the very beginning of the album, you know Seize the Time is not going to be a comfortable listen. To start the first track of your debut album with a truly disgusting and horrific 30-second-long answer-machine message from a cockney racist, full of P-words, N-words and C-words and ending in a chilling death threat. It’s a really affective opener, shocking, and it’s an inspired way to start the album. Because it shouldn’t be a comfortable listen; these are not comfortable topics.

And that’s the way the album continues. I usually find ‘unapologetic’ a weird word to be applied to artists going against the mainstream – why should they ever be ‘apologetic’ in the first place? – but I think it’s quite well-placed for Fun^da^Mental, and Aki Nawaz in particular. They are not here to make polite requests; they’re not here to give you pleasant, comfortably unfamiliar Asian music to boost your progressive cred. They’re not going to sit around and allow you to put them in the world music box, or the Asian underground box, or any box at all. They’re difficult, and fuck you for thinking your opinion matters.

The uncompromising lyrics talk about what it was like to live life while being young, Asian, British and Muslim in the early 1990s without pulling any of the punches, and they still – sadly, angrily – hold too much weight even 25 years later. They’re all held together by a supreme musical tapestry that similarly reflects the soundscape of Britain for young British-Asians: it’s very much in the old school hip-hop mould, but the instrumentals are full of quotes and inspirations from Bollywood, bhangra, South Asian classical music and other folk music, as well as jungle, dub, electronica and lots of punk in both sound and attitude. There’s also a liberal dousing of spoken samples, from the inspirational (Malcolm X) to the rage-inducing (predictably-Tory MP Alan Clark). The group’s place in the fledgling world dubtronica scene is felt with the inclusion of Transglobal Underground’s Tim Whelan, Neil Sparkes and Nick Page.

It’s always maddening when art made through injustice retains its meaning with very little change over such a long period of time. The great thing about music, though, is that it helps – awareness is heightened, people get angry and the groundswell continues. Seize the Time is just as important to listen to now as it was in 1994 – revisit it if you’ve not for a while, and listen and learn if you’ve never experienced. Get furious. We need that now.

224: center:level:roar, by Youngblood Brass Band

Youngblood Brass Band (USA)
center:level:roar (2003)
15 tracks, 68 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Considering that the Youngblood Brass Band hail from Madison, Wisconsin, they are most definitely in the storied tradition of the New Orleans brass bands, but they don’t play the same stuff as you would hear on those streets in the 1950s. Theirs reflects the tradition’s place as folk music – music that moves with the people. So as well as playing that signature Louisiana jazz, their music is suffused with the sounds of hip-hop, breakbeat and funk. They were one of the first generation of groups to fully embrace the idea of a ‘hip-hop brass band’ along with the Soul Rebels and the Hot 8 Brass Band, which later became an important sound even in the venerable old bands such as Rebirth Brass Band and Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

So that’s what they do: their line-up – for this most exciting of their albums – is a 10-strong jumble of trumpets, trombones, tenor sax, sousaphone, drums and percussion, all set up to march with the best of them, but with the beats and funky basslines of hip-hop integral to the sound. Snare drummer David Hinzie-Skogen is also the group’s rapper, and his style ranges from almost-spoken word poetry in the more subdued pieces to the rapid-fire scream-spitting of Rage Against the Machine in the full-on bouncing tracks.

Although the raps are rich in content and rhythm, I rather prefer their instrumental tracks here – or the ones closest to instrumental – such as ‘Round 1’, ‘Camouflage’ and ‘V.I.P.’. And then there’s ‘Brooklyn’. Another instrumental track, ‘Brooklyn’ is just an incredible recording. The composition is absolutely spot-on for one thing: it moves between themes quite quickly, but they don’t come out of nowhere; each make sense with the ones around them, and each are as head-banging and foot-stomping as the others, the layers of music split between the instruments all coming together as a great barrage of sound. And you’ve got amazing solos too, from trombone, tenor sax, sousaphone and percussion as they roll through old-school New Orleans brass, soul, R’n’B and hip-hop on their journey. It’s a wonderful piece that quite rightly became the Youngbloods’ signature, and was even adopted into the brass band canon around the US.

Nat McIntosh’s sousaphone deserves a special mention too. Although the instrument is basically a fancy, stretched out and looped tuba, the sounds that McIntosh gets out of it are astounding. I’d never heard anything like it before. All throughout center:level:roar, the pieces are punctuated by the scratching of turntablism, strange synth chords and a whole range of sound effects from sirens to horses…but it’s all the sousaphone. By playing the instrument more like a didgeridoo – where the voice, embouchure and shape of the mouth cavity and throat are all manipulated to change the quality of sound rather than the pitch – McIntosh brings a whole new layer of sound to the traditional brass band set-up.

As a bit of a ‘you might also like…’, if you dig center:level:roar and a bunch of other stuff I’ve covered on this blog before, check out the Brooklyn Qawwali Party. They were formed by a few members of the Youngblood Brass Band and made a mash-up between brass band music, jazz, rock and qawwali music, their repertoire consisting solely of pieces made famous by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The results weren’t always exactly on the money, but it really is a fascinating experiment that has its special moments…and I’ve just noticed that they released a second album that I never knew existed, a whole seven years after their first. So that’s my evening sorted…

216: Engurland (City Shanties), by Dizraeli

Dizraeli (United Kingdom)
Engurland (City Shanties) (2009)
12 tracks, 42 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Engurland (City Shanties) was the album that poet-rapper Dizraeli made shortly before he formed The Small Gods, whose album Moving in the Dark we’ve already discussed.

After a long time fronting the Brighton-based funky-dubby D’n’B hip-hop band Bad Science, this was the first time he struck out under his own (stage) name, and took a bit of a different direction with it. All the way through this album, although there are many different factors and influences, the most frequent and obvious is the blend of hip-hop with British folk. It’s not as simple as Dizraeli just rapping over some twee English tunes with a beat to them, though. Instead, it’s more that he’s taken the way stories are told in traditional folk songs and applied that same technique to his own lyricism, whether in his raps, poems or songs. The melding of folk music and hip-hop instrumentals (as well as jazz, bits of classical and the like) is definitely still present here, but it’s done – like all of Dizraeli’s work – with the utmost intelligence and ingenuity that there’s not a shred of contrivance in the whole thing.

Really, there’s so much to love on this album, whatever your preferred direction is. The title track ‘Engurland’ is the most recognisable track on the album and probably the one that got the most attention – it’s a clever use of Fat Les’s ‘Vindaloo’ that takes a rather bleak overview of the grottier side of modern Englishness with a wicked chorus – but there’s so much else here. From a hip-hop angle, there’s some of the most addictive rap flows I’ve ever heard in ‘To the Garden’ and ‘Good God’; there’s beautiful, sad songs in ‘Take Me Dancing’, ‘Reach Out’ and ‘It Won’t Be Long’; there’s the absurdist poem ‘Bomb Tesco’ and the heart-breaking spoken-word story of ‘Maria’; there’s even some delicious folk-baroque instrumentals in ‘Pen Tangle’ (geddit?) and ‘Reach In’.

Engurland (City Shanties) has an (obviously, unavoidably) more youthful sound than his later work – ever so slightly more naïve, perhaps a tiny bit performative in some of its edginess – but it’s not actually any the worse for that. This is an album of outstanding craft, full of incredible rhetorical acrobatics, laugh-out-loud moments and genuinely spine-tingling moments (I’ll never forget his performance of ‘Maria’ to a packed Jazz Café: unaccompanied spoken word and the crowd was silent, hanging off every syllable until the chorus, when every voice in unison and entirely unbidden, began to sing as one. Tear-inducing.)

I said a similar thing last time, but I honestly do believe that Dizraeli – as a wordsmith, as a thinker and as a musician – should be legitimately regarded as a genius. It was obvious ten years ago when this album came out and it’s only been shown to be the real deal with everything he has done since. If you don’t follow the work of Dizraeli, I urge you to delve deep – there’s an ocean in his work.

[If you want to know more about Dizraeli, I highly recommend the thorough and well-written article on UKHH by Emilia Cox, entitled ‘Dizraeli: The Story So Far’]

210: Street Signs, by Ozomatli

Ozomatli (USA)
Street Signs (2004)
13 tracks, 52 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I’m heading off to Boomtown festival in a couple of weeks and Ozomatli are right at the top of my must-see list. They are seriously one of the very best live bands I’ve ever seen – they can turn any occasion into a party within seconds of arriving on stage and it doesn’t let up until they’re leading the crowd on a massive samba from within. While their sound has evolved across their 24 years, their core has stayed basically consistent: Latin music of all colours (from salsa to cumbia to mariachi to the aforementioned samba) with a whole load of hip-hop in there and a good measure of rock, and usually with some pointed lyrics too. This is the real sound of Los Angeles.

When you have a band whose live shows are such a tour de force, it’s sometimes hard for their studio albums to live up to the same standard. That’s not a worry when it comes to Street Signs, although it does stick out as a little bit different from the rest of the group’s albums. It was Ozomatli’s third full length release out of (currently) eight studio albums, and it is by far their most ‘world music’ of offerings. Their first two (1998’s Ozomatli and 2001’s Embrace the Chaos) were much more focused on the Latin hip-hop thing, and afterward they went in a more good-time pop-rock direction. On Street Signs, though, they brought all sorts of stuff to the table, from Arabic sounds to Balkan brass, flamenco to Indian elements, and all without taking anything away from that classic Ozo sound.

This eclectic mix is also apparent in the amount and variety of guests on the album. There are so many: there’s featured artists such as Nuyorican salsa piano legend Eddie Palmieri, Los Lobos frontman David Hidalgo and baritone rapper and erstwhile Ozo member Chali 2na, but there’s also more subtle and less assuming guest slots for other stars in their own right such as Gnawa master Hassan Hakmoun and French Roma jazz group Les Yeux Noirs. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan even gets a co-writer’s credit on ‘Believe’, although I’ve never been able to work out what for, exactly. Usually albums with a buttload of guests end up sounding stilted and try-hard, but not this one. Everyone just fits in where they’re supposed to, never take up too much room than necessary and just slot right into the Ozomatli party.

Because, for all its difference from the band’s other records, Street Signs still has that same atmosphere. Tracks such as ‘Saturday Night’ and ‘Street Signs’ are typical Ozo bangers with some amazing raps and blaring horns, but even when they do something different such as the brooding opener ‘Believe’ or Chali 2na’s Egyptian-flavoured guest number ‘Who’s to Blame’ have a suitably political message while all but requiring you to dance along.

Street Signs is Ozo’s most esoteric album of their career so far, but I still reckon it’s their best all-round set. But as good as it is, you don’t want to hear this coming out of your stereo speakers – you want to hear it all going on in front of you in all its sweaty, chaotic glory. Ozomatli: see them live at any cost; if you can’t, Street Signs is still as good a time as any.

197: Midnight Marauders, by A Tribe Called Quest

A Tribe Called Quest (USA)
Midnight Marauders (1993)
15 tracks, 54 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

This is an interesting album to compare to Us3’s Hand on the Torch. That album and A Tribe Called Quest’s were both released in the same year, 1993, and they both show different ways of approaching a very similar thing. Because for all intents and purposes, A Tribe Called Quest – and Midnight Marauders – are jazz hip-hop, but their style is approached from the opposite direction: Us3 was created with the intention of using a catalogue of samples from classic jazz to create hip-hop; Tribe just set out to make great hip-hop and use jazz as a tool for that. Back when I wrote about Us3, I called their album ‘semi-successful’ but prescient of the future sound of jazz. Midnight Marauders is a much more successful album.

I think it’s because it was made with so little pretence. Us3’s sound was, almost by definition, contrived, but Tribe’s feels so much more real, organic. Their instrumentals, created in the most part by Q-Tip on production and Ali Shaheed Muhammad as DJ, are top-class and built up from really diverse samples from vintage funk, soul and, yep, jazz, as well as intelligent and subtle beats programming, but importantly, it’s all made with the raps in mind. Here, the raps are the whole point of the record, and why shouldn’t they be? Between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, the lyrics are insightful, thoughtful and meaningful, emotional but witty, often uplifting but pointed when necessary. The flows are exquisite, and, even though they still have a touch of early hip-hop’s nursery rhymes to them, the rhythms are interesting. The end result is that the music is a perfect fit for the vocals, and the vocals are a perfect fit for the music – an acutely balanced symbiotic relationship that works for the benefit of both.

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that an album made for hip-hop fans is a better hip-hop album than one that aims to reach a crossover audience with a specific musical concept. And of course it is. Because for all intents and purposes, A Tribe Called Quest – and Midnight Marauders – are not jazz hip-hop, they’re merely hip-hop that use jazz in its most fruitful way to create their own rightfully legendary sound.

186: Boomerang, by Daara J

Daara J (Senegal)
Boomerang (2003)
13 tracks, 56 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I can't quite remember how I first came across Daara J. I have a vague memory of buying their album in an HMV, possibly on spec from having heard their name somewhere, but I also know I saw them on my 13th birthday at WOMAD as part of a strange 30-minutes-each double bill on the main stage with The Drummers of Burundi. I'm not sure which came first, but the end result was me listening to Boomerang and loving it.

I was thrilled to work out that this was hip-hop, and that I actually 'got' it. Hip-hop was always something other people liked that I never really understood, but this one hit me in the right places, even if I couldn't understand any of the Wolof and only a tiny fraction of the French. And – because that's how these things go – it opened my ears up to a whole world of hip-hop that I'm still loving and learning to this day.

It's not just hip-hop on offer on Boomerang, but those are the most successful bits of the album. The rest is more musically inclined towards pop and R'n'B that sounded dated enough when it came out, let alone now. Basically, you want to stick to the first five tracks of this one for the cream of the album, which goes noticeably downhill after that. But those five tracks are excellent. The highlight is the title track and opener. It's a rumination on the idea that hip-hop 'boomeranged' from Africa to America and now back. The raps in Wolof are at a blistering pace but every syllable is clear; the rhythms are exciting and the hooks from the then-young Malian singer Rokia Traore (who also appears on the track 'Le Cycle') are really beautiful.

Where Daara J are at their best – as they are on this album – is when they are uncompromising in their Senegalese identity. Their music may be born from hip-hop and doused in anything from soul to reggae to salsa, but there's also inescapable influences from mbalax, the sabar and tama drumming from the Wolof people and any number of other audibly Senegalese styles.

Of course, by the time I tried to impress the cooler kids at school with the fact I'd finally got into hip-hop (albeit in a slightly unusual way), they'd moved onto something else and hip-hop was deemed uncool now, and so remained I. But the joke's on them. I got to dig this great album that included African hip-hop at its best, and build a whole new taste in music from that point. They didn't. So nerr.

179: Come Find Yourself, by Fun Lovin' Criminals

Fun Lovin’ Criminals (USA)
Come Find Yourself (1996)
15 tracks, 57 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Other than the vaguest definitions of cool being a sort of unflappability, it's so hard to describe what makes something cool without getting into circular logic, that cool is... well, cool. Or, y’know, hip. The easiest way to explain it is to offer examples, and every so often there comes some piece of culture that helps us to calibrate our (individual) sense of ‘cool.’ The first time I heard Come Find Yourself, I had to rejig my conception of cool.

Because I'm not sure there is a better way to describe this album. It is a distillation of cool. Musically, the Fun Lovin Criminals' debut album is based on rock, rap and funk with lyrics heavily referencing New York City and crime, but also deeper and more ponderous topics. But the coolness comes, as it often does, in its personality. There are small elements of jazz in the album's music, but I hear a lot more jazz in the attitude – lead singer Huey Morgan's performance mannerisms can't help but put me in mind of hipsters and beats from the 1950s, with a Latino edge, even when he's rapping.

The album is full of great tracks, from the most famous singles of ‘Scooby Snacks’ and ‘The Fun Lovin Criminal’ to lesser-known album tracks such as ‘Smoke ’Em’ and ‘Bombing the L’, but to me, the track that really stands out comes at the end of the album as a bonus track: an alternate, 'Schmoove' version of the piece 'I Can't Get With That'. In some ways, I feel like it's the epitome of the album; although musically quite different from the rest – the rock is stripped back and replaced by a groovy, soulful jazz; the rap slowed down and its rhythm relaxed into more of a speech-song – it takes the coolness cultivated throughout to the next level. It really takes its time. Nothing about the track is rushed, nothing is overstated, but it has everything it needs, no more or less. I'm not usually one for alternative takes or versions of tracks (apart from remixes and dubs), but for me, this track has become my go-to of the album, and the one I think of whenever Fun Lovin Criminals come to mind.

Real coolness may be indefinable, but it's easy to point at something that defines cool through its very existence. And if you're under any misconceptions: Come Find Yourself is COOL.

169: Live in the Street, by Dub FX

Dub FX (Australia)
Live in the Street (2008)
10 tracks, 52 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

In 2019, when the beatbox-and-loop-pedal, ‘all from the mouth’ sort of thing is now a well-known gimmick, the music of Dub FX still stands out as great music regardless of how it’s made. It is true that all the sounds on this album come from the mouth of Dub FX (as well as a couple of guest rappers on two of the tracks), at least at the beginning of their journey. Those sounds then go through so many layers of looping and processing that they come out as a whole selection of synths and drum machines.

What I find especially impressive is his range of production skills that are conducted entirely live and, for the most part, with his feet. As his name suggests, dub is a huge part of his sound, and he uses a lot of the same techniques as a dubmaster in his performance. Not only does he build up the loops seamlessly, he then takes the various ‘live’ looping samples of the track and process them all separately, dropping them in and out of the mix as appropriate, apply different effects and huge delays on each individually, all to craft and change the atmosphere throughout a piece. That these dub techniques are utilised on his own sound that is actually a mix of varous hip-hop and electronic styles give a really unique spin on the solo beatbox trope. And Dub FX’s use of beatbox doesn’t stray too far away from its original purpose either – at the end of it all, his dance-and-trance-inducing soundscapes are a wonderful vehicle for his raps, which he tumbles into with supreme flow.

Obviously, this album was recorded entirely live, and entirely on the street. It’s his very first album, made to sell while busking, and I really think that’s the perfect setting for his music and performance. I've seen him live in busking mode many times, actually – sometimes by chance, sometimes by design, and the connection that he shares with his audience as they all stand on the same level, just a metre apart is truly special. It sort of reinforces the whole ‘live’ nature of the performance, that even though the music has the sound of perfectly crafted electronica, at the heart of it it’s still all done on-the-fly, and the audience affects it in a very real way, whether literally getting up and taking a turn on the mic (he’s always open for new musical friends – even I’ve had the pleasure of jamming with him under a bridge in Berlin) or just in the reciprocal vibes that pass between everyone present. I caught him doing a show once on a proper stage, raised up and apart from his audience, and while the music was technically fine, the atmosphere was just shot. The street is his real home and the ideal place for his art.

I feel the same way about Dub FX’s albums. He’s released quite a few studio recordings after this one, and to be fair, they are actually really good – that production wizardry is even more in evidence when he’s behind a mixing desk rather than a bunch of effects pedals – but for me, this debut perfectly captures everything that he and his music are all about: getting down on the level, crafting the sounds organically among people, and letting the whole vibe flow easily through the microphone.

132: Straight Outta Compton, by N.W.A

N.W.A (USA)
Straight Outta Compton (1988)
13 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Haha what a contrast with yesterday’s album, I love it. This is another one of those bona fide classics that have already been written about ad nauseam, so I doubt I’ll be bringing anything particularly new to the table, but I’ll give it a go anyway.

I was actually quite late to listening to this one all the way through as an album, as opposed to hearing tracks randomly here and there. When I did finally listen to it, it actually struck me as quite funny. Straight Outta Compton’s reputation preceded it as the record that solidified the moral panic around hip-hop and rap, especially with its stand-out track ‘Fuck tha Police’, but listening to it now, it seems rather tame. For starters, the rap style that was characterised as ‘hyperaggressive’ at the time seems nothing of the sort now; it’s not quite the nursery rhyme style that was around a few years earlier, but the rhythms are still quite simple and slow and the rhymes nowhere near as complex as they would become in the next decade of hip-hop. Even the lyrics – much criticised for their violent content – seem over-the-top in a cartoonish, rather than scandalous, way.

At more than 30 years since its first release, it’s no surprise that the record has aged somewhat. It’s not all turned more light-hearted in the interim though. For example, while some of the ways the group refer to women were shocking when it first came out, the deliberately provocativeness of the language has faded and now they just sound sad and disgusting, and to be honest a bit embarrassing in retrospect. What is still shocking, though, is ‘Fuck tha Police’, not in how much it has aged, but how much it hasn’t. It is clear how much black people, especially black men and boys, are the target for so much institutional racism from police forces (in the UK as well as the US), being so much more likely to be stopped by police, searched, arrested, beaten up and murdered by police for no reason other than the colour of their skin, with almost always zero repercussions – this is in 2019. It is absolutely disgusting and – again – embarrassing that a piece of music written more than 30 years ago can so accurately describe the exact same problems facing a huge portion of the population then as they are now, and seemingly nothing at all has changed. It’s pathetic.

…but politically-induced emotions aside, this is still a fun album. The music is funky – due in a large part to the many samples of straight-up funk used to create the instrumentals – and the lyrics are witty and clever, even if the rhyme schemes aren’t that complex. There’s no doubt that the controversy around N.W.A and Straight Outta Compton helped to elevate it to popularity at the time, and into legendary status since, but it is pleasing to know that the album still stands up now that the controversy has (mostly) died away.

101: Better Than Heavy/Better Than Dub, by Mongrel

Mongrel (United Kingdom)
Better Than Heavy/Better Than Dub (2009)
20 tracks, 75 minutes (2 CDs)
Spotify • iTunes

Mongrel was an interesting but short-lived project, a supergroup led by Jon McClure (him from Reverend and the Makers) with Andy Nicholson and Matt Helders (Arctic Monkeys), Drew McConnell (Babyshambles) and rapper Lowkey (then of Poisonous Poets). Their music was a marrying of indie rock and hip-hop, and in hindsight, it feels like they had a bit of a Gorillaz sort of thing going on with their sound. Setting them apart from Damon Albarn's lot though, Mongrel were explicitly political, calling out specific politicians and almost every track having some sort of heavy message attached.

Better Than Heavy was Mongrel’s only album, and they actually gave it away free as a covermount CD with The Independent newspaper. Considering free newspaper CDs were often quite naff, I was really impressed with this one. So impressed that I actually went out and paid money for it in the end: while the album itself was produced by Adrian Sherwood (On-U auteur, UK dub superstar and one of my favourite producers), the on-sale version came with an extra disc, Better Than Dub, which, as you may guess, was a set of dub remixes from Sherwood himself. I made a good choice too – I reckon that bonus disc is possibly better than the original. Sherwood really knows how to bend tracks into something completely different.

The album got roundly panned by the music media, but I don’t know. I get where the critics are coming from for most of it. A lot of the political themes and references throughout the album were dated even at the time of release, or else explained in a really naff, simplistic way. Perfect for a left-wing 18 year old, but ten years on, I can see how that can be grating. I think the whole thing would be better without Jon McClure. The music on the album is solid and Lowkey and the huge cast of guest MCs are great – and they even have Bassekou Kouyaté playing his ngoni here and there – and those are what makes the album enjoyable; McClure’s contributions are the bits you have to get through to enjoy the rest though.

Mongrel was really a project that I thought could have legs. It didn’t, as it turned out. McClure talked up a next album, touting collaborations with M.I.A. and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and saying “We're really taking a few people to task, kind of like we're Public Enemy or something.” Cringe. Not long after, Lowkey gave up music to study politics full-time, and the second album never materialised. Maybe it was for the best. But for all the harsh critics, Better Than Heavy and Better Than Dub are still good, if flawed, albums.

097: Hand On the Torch, by Us3

Us3 (United Kingdom)
Hand On the Torch (1993)
15 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify • iTunes

Jazz hip-hop wasn’t exactly new by the time Us3 released their debut, Hand On the Torch. A Tribe Called Quest and a few others had already brought in jazz samples into their work as grist to their mill, but this was the first time the mix of jazz and hip-hop was brought to the fore as the raison d’être of the piece.

All of the samples used on Hand On the Torch are from legendary Blue Note recordings, from Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey to Donald Byrd and Horace Silver. It wasn’t too hard for producers Geoff Wilkinson and Mel Simpson to get the rights to those recordings either: this was the first hip-hop record to be released on Blue Note itself.

The album as a whole is of mixed success. It’s not bad by any stretch, and the use of samples is great (helped by the fact that the samples are great), but for me, the rapping by Rahsaan Kelly and Kobie Powell aren’t too adventurous in terms of lyrics or rhythms. As an album, it’s not stood the test of time as well as others of the period such as Quest’s Midnight Marauders or Brand Nubian’s One For All. But it does have one enduring classic.

‘Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)’ stands up where the rest of the album doesn’t quite, and it sticks in the head for much longer. Based around Herbie Hancock’s first recording of ‘Cantaloupe Island’, it’s basically a manifesto of jazz hip-hop. The sample is, again, brilliant, and fits in so well with the beats, and the rap is one of the best on the album. What I really like about this track, though, is the way the rap and the long trumpet solo by Gerard Presencer work together; the placing of the solo invites us to consider the rap verses in the same way. It’s not hip-hop wearing the vestments of jazz, this is hip-hop as jazz, and I reckon that’s what makes this track stand out in particular.

For all its boundary pushing elements through the ages, the world of jazz is littered with conservative voices and sentiments, all the way back to the mouldy figs. Luckily there have always been those willing to experiment and collaborate and fuse in different musical directions, and as one of the first proper collaborative projects between jazz and hip-hop (in terms of both musicians and industry), Us3 have been proven on the right side of history. Contemporary jazz owes so much to hip-hop that it’s almost impossible to imagine today’s styles divorced from those influences, especially the ever-present shadows of J Dilla. Us3 may not have been the earliest or the best examples of jazz in hip-hop, but they definitely have an important place in the history of hip-hop in jazz.

096: Na$tyjam$, by Crudbump

Crudbump (USA)
Na$tyjam$ (2010)
15 tracks, 38 minutes
Bandcamp

Drew Fairweather is a true renaissance man. Research scientist, artist of various schools (see here, here and here), novelist, YouTube reviewing superstar, blogger, pioneer of Weird Twitter and all-around internet troll – he does it all. Of course, he is also a musician. Or, several musicians. Like Señor Coconut, Drew has a bunch of aliases for his many different musical projects: for industrial hip-hop, he was KOMPRESSOR, for vaporwave he’s Cyber Vision, and for…whatever this is, he’s Crudbump.

Crudbump is hip-hop, on the spoken end of rap. There’s not that much use in talking about the quality of the music, the production or the rhymes though, because they’re really not important. The point is that, as with everything Drew does (except, I guess when he was a research scientist), Crudbump is really funny. There’s all manner of humour here: it’s childish and child-like, it’s brash . It’s sometimes satirical, sometimes scatological, and usually boner-centric. Above all, it’s really, really bizarre.

This is absurdity as art, and it really is rather beautiful. Who can argue with lyrics such as ‘Welcome to Horsetown: here’s a horse’? Then there’s classics such as ‘My Dick’s On The Phone (Rang Rang),’ (‘You better pick up the phone / you better chat with the bone / it’s got important information’) and ‘I Don’t Do Shit’ (‘I don’t do shit that’s my decision / not doing shit is like my religion / look to the east five times a day / and if I’m doing shit then I put it away’). I also want to mention another track by Crudbump but not on Na$tyjam$, a stand-alone single and one of the best Christmas songs ever, ‘Fuck You If You Don’t Like Christmas.’ It’s a staple on my Christmas playlists and a sentiment I heartily agree with.

To be honest, I’m not sure what I can say about this album that isn’t either immediately obvious or just completely beyond words. It’s weird and surreal, and I suspect it might be working on brain-levels far above and beyond anything comprehensible by humans. Meanwhile, I find it just hilarious. Give it a go.

083: Gorillaz, by Gorillaz

Gorillaz (United Kingdom)
Gorillaz (2001)
16 tracks, 61 minutes
Spotify • iTunes

Gorillaz are one of the biggest bands around nowadays, so it feels a little disingenuous to talk about this album as though you’ve never heard it. I think their other albums have surpassed the debut in terms of popularity, though, so I think this one deserves another look.

I don’t know why, but I still approach this album in the same way as I did when it first came out. It was mysterious. They were referred to as ‘the first virtual band,’ but I think that was just the early 2000s excitement with the internet coming through a bit; what it actually meant was that the band members were basically anonymous, masquerading behind cartoon characters. It was common knowledge that it was fronted by Damon Albarn of Blur, but the rest were unknown (to me, at least). As such, there wasn’t much clue as to what the music was going to be like.

It turns out, it was going to be a lot. It was some mix between alternative rock and hip-hop, but that’s only half of it. There’s lots of trip hop and dub in there, punk and pop occasionally too. And it’s all done so well, no matter where it travels. It even goes to Cuba, with guest vocals from Buena Vista Social Club legend Ibrahim Ferrer.

If I had to pick, I’d say the album is best when it’s straddling the line between hip-hop and trip-hop…but there’s really no point in picking favourite tracks because they are literally all great. ‘Clint Eastwood’ with the great rap from Del Tha Funkee Homosapien obviously stands out and the polyrhythmic indie of ‘5/4’ is really cool, but other less-flashy tracks such as ‘Double Bass’ and ‘Latin Simone’ (with the aforementioned Ferrer) definitely deserve the attention too. And let’s not forget the hidden track, the raga refix of ‘Clint Eastwood’ by Ed Case, which rivals the original and is a great addition to almost any DJ set.

What a perfect debut album. Gorillaz seemed to come basically out of no-where, no-one really knew what it was all about, and the album keeps you guessing as to what’s going to come next. Nothing is what you expect, from start to end, but it’s exciting and enjoyable the whole way through. No wonder they went on to be huge.

057: Youth, by Matisyahu

Matisyahu (USA)
Youth (2006)
13 tracks, 47 minutes
Spotify • iTunes

The first time I'd heard of Matisyahu was on Later…with Jools Holland. He was dressed in a simple white shirt and a long black coat, with a large bushy beard on his chin and a kippah on his head. And then the incongruity: he was spewing some fast and accomplished beatbox directly into the mic. Then his band kicked in with some bass-heavy reggae. It was the first time this northern-English village lad had encountered Chasidism – and I wouldn’t have expected it to sound like this.

The album he was playing from on Jools was his second from the studio, Youth. The music is reggae, but with heavy doses of rock (from the band) and hip-hop (from Matisyahu’s raps), and others besides. It’s also produced by veteran electronica/world music/everything wiz Bill Laswell, who adds a welcome bucketload of dub into the mix.

The music is good in and of itself, but it’s the lyrics that make this album particularly interesting. As it was made back when Matisyahu was Chasidic (he’s since moved to a more mainstream version of orthodox Judaism), the words and themes of Youth are very relevant to that lifestyle. There’s lots of talk of God, references to scripture and religious philosophy and Judaically-informed guidance and advice. In the end, a lot of the lyrics sound rather similar to those of roots reggae, albeit with 100% less Jah.

It’s not perfect: the occasional use of a cod-Jamaican accent is a tad embarrassing and some of the rockier bits are quite cheesy, but 2006 is just about getting long enough ago to start looking regrettable, so let’s forgive the album a couple of dated elements.

A nice little thing to note is that alongside the standard record, a limited edition dub version was released too. Excitingly entitled Youth Dub, this side-release allowed Laswell to go nuts with all his creative might, and bringing Matisyahu’s backing band, Roots Tonic, to the fore. I love a dub remix album, so it’s all good by me. I can’t find Youth Dub to listen to anywhere online, and its rarity means it’s going for mad money second-hand – if you want to listen, drop me a message.