Kinda feeling

Edan- Beauty and The Beat. Hip hop sunstruck a strong dose of sunny day cheap psychedlia; like Beck if he was good, or Donovan produced by De La Soul. chunky and funky with bold vocals, dunno how much depth there is though.

Definitely feeling something, dunno quite what though

Dwight Trible and The Life Force Trio- immersive textural soulful house produced by supergroup of Daedelus, Madlib, Sa-Ra, somewhat wishy washy hippy lyrics. But for tactile sonic depth it can't be beat.

Really feeling

Nudge- Cached. Supergroup of Portland types inc. Paul Dickow and members of Jackie-O Motherfucker- pristine dub-pop, sparkling surface sheen, but with echoed worm holes taking you in and out of the songs. Like New Order produced by 80s Can at their most playful.

Really really feeling

Quasimoto- Further Adventures of Lord Quas. A fat hip hop comic book of mutating MCs, inhuman voices, trash-TV samples, snatches of soul.

"Combination style, myself Jammer and Eskiboy!" recorded on Aftershock on 1xtra. It's some murkle man lyrics over another darkside Wiley orchestral thing, but check out that metal-reverb snare and dubby bass- a dubstep influence methinks? Wiley's MCing on this is utterly fantastic, his voice is red-raw. He takes about four quick verses (the boogieman lyrics, "you ain't real, I know the deal", lots more familiar stuff) in between jammer's lyrics and each time Wiley totally kills it.

Perhaps the proper DnB analogy for dubstep isn't "intelligent" DnB, but the Bristol sound of Roni Size and Krust- dense, almost catatonic low end science. Always rolling rather than rinsing.

In teresting Dissensus thread on "Showtime" versus "Treading On Thin Ice". There's certainly a hidden heart to Wiley's album as much as there is a bleak, joyless streak to Showtime, but I don't have to totally love Dizzee's album to [stands up tall, pulls up socks] totally respect his work here. Certainly certain tracks- Everywhere, Karma- seem like dense, caustic ramblings of a paranoid weed smoker. These tracks lose their intended streetwise poise of "I'm everywhere, I can't be seen" by the fact that they seem preoccupied, haunted. It's like listening to a bloke at a party going on about the business moves he's making, when he's just wasting time going on about it to you. When he hits "you must be making moves why you watching mine", the circular references become a bit too tight. Nevertheless, Learn still sounds to me utterly thrilling- the slow, paced deliberate delivery and those concise, cold-blooded lines about "throw you 50 pence"; in the background a Wu Tang type track limps doggedly along like an old Samurai. But real proof that the album has a soul comes with the astonishing Fickle, with grounds orchestral arpeggios against a Mantronix-like rrrrrrrrrrrolling drum machine. The epicness is justified by lyrics which for me are intensely tear jerking- "there's money to be made, it's a cold world too, noone go your got your best interests at heart like you". I remember Terror Danjah playing this on the UKG mix show well after the album was released, saying something like "this one I just think is special". I think so too.

Weirdly, the corresponding last track off Treddin On Thin Ice, I Was Lost (also the 15th track), has a very similar feel- swallow-you-up urban atmospherics offset by mechanical, tickalong percussion. Try playing these tracks back to back, there's a very similar vibe. One track which has really matured well on Wiley's album is "for a reason", where he gives his self-confessional a lovely ripe backing track- a nice combination of sweet and sour, plus an appropriate positive spin for the very english "oh well, that's life" lyrics. Wiley's album creaks elsewhere I think- his natural charism and gabbiness is undone by having a whole pop-concept built around it. It's too uniform and self-aggrandizing. It's also too plasticy. We are put in touch with his fetishism and that's it. On the other hand, Dizzee's aggresion is certainly off putting, but occasionally this viscous tension makes for some truly compelling music, and there is a hint of redemption there. Both fantastic albums, and seriously compelling to listen back to them again 6 months or so after they were released.

I forgot what sharp lyricists Renegade Boys are- "I've been living on toast for two and a half years, now I'm sitting on the bog trying to sweat out a log the size of Southend pier".

Anyone go to see One Self, aka DJ Vadim, at the Jazz Cafe last night? Stuff I've heard has been excellent, I'm really curious to know how it went...

Very nice Martin Clark piece about dubstep- but, isn't this music seem really hard to describe in an exciting way? "excessive sub bass, seductive offkey melodies"- it just sounds dull when put like that, not that that's Clarkie's fault.

Lioness and Rikodan blogs.

Ah man, so little time to do blogging. A shame! Here's some bits and bobs I've been liking recently. That new Riko tune Godfather is bigger than my boots, a slow ragga production with echoey gloopy bits which suggest a Rhythm And Sound comparison. Basically, Riko is good as usual, but it's the mood of the tune which is absolutely perfect- sweeping Nina Rota type strings, Riko declaiming "I - am - the - Godfather, dem - know - dem- can't - test...". He's an orator, a rhetorician, Riko, isn't he? What I mean is, he rhymes with so much authority it's spinetingling, and this track is has an imperious presence which rivals it's mic-man. Another track that I heard on Logan's show is a fabulous new Newham Generals track called Mic Centre. A very different take on ragga to Godfather really, a dry, scratchy arabic sample drives the tune along at a slow pace; it's somewhere between Murder She Wrote and The Ethiopiques series' Mahmoud Ahmed CD- exotic, dense, bewildering, a lounge band on bad drugs. On the track, D Double and Footsy trade lyrics about a wild night pulling girls, and the track concludes with a phone call sample saying "oi blud, I just woke up", the call continuing with some strange, intuitive rhymes, like the MC/caller is still wiping the sleep out of his eyes. Pearsall was in his usual eloquent way going on the changes in Wylie's production style, something I was thinking about recently. Orchestral/brass stabs seem to have replaced a lot of the rinky dinky electronic beeps, with Ice Cream Man being a turning point where the tune ping ponged between bars in the old bleep style and the new blaring style. Anyway, he obviously dug DaVinche's productions in this kinda blaxploitation anthem vein, but what really interests me about his new style is how it always seems tantalisintly unresolved. Whereas Jammer's version of the Fire Hydrant/Murkle Man tune is straightforward blaring energy, Wiley's cut of the rhythm has all sorts of restless electronic textures interlaced into the tune. The energy builds and builds, but even the gunshot sample doesn't seem to fully expend all it's power, it still seems unresolved, unrestrained. Ice Cream man similarly doesn't seem to go anywhere, just to sporadically explode in blaring aggression. Is this good, is this bad? It's certainly compelling. Another tune played by Logan recently is Sidewinder, with so many MCs on that they must have found a studio with an integrated multi story car park. Ruff Squad MCs are tough and rough, and the passage which goes from a Ruff Squad MC's "big shot big shot pum pum pum" to Trim's "it's the playground and I play the bully" rhyme is fabulous. Jammer crops up again to do his Murkle Man bit, which rocks. In other news, Kano is going to have a mixtape soon, innit. Definitely coming, although who knows if it will be the 3xCD release mentioned in the RWD forums. It will be very big indeed, I'm sure. That's all for now- more very soon, I promise!

That new Swizz Beats production of Remy Martin, Whatever- sounds like it samples Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky. Weird.

It's got to be a good weekend when you get into work on Monday with a double CD track for track companion to the Simon Reynolds grime primer- nice one John! It's all banging, ever minute of the 140 on there, although obviously some of it has come from the radio so the sound quality goes [straight] up and down. There's no rhythmic blueprint at work in the evolution of grime- one of the biggest tunes ever, Eskimo, has practically no beats. Instead it's developed through the squiggles and sound signatures- Wiley's beeps, Terror Danjah's shivery strings, Dexplicit's ear-bleeding handclaps. It's interesting that the sharing of these signatures is almost encouraged in the scene- although you've got to have your own production style, referencing someone else's audio memes in accepted. So you get alternative versions of Ghetto Kayote, No Help No Handouts; tracks obviously massively influenced by others, eg a major-key re-version of the Eskimo rhythm. The beats tend to reform, restructure around the music rather than the other way around. Straight Flush was one of the biggest grime anthems, but the beats are actually more or less hiphop, ditto Ghetto Kayote. Perhaps a lot of this is because these are beats that exist primarily on pirate radio and Mp3- the beats don't seem to physically exist anywhere; they don't dominate/reclaim public space as with hip hop . Where are the beats? Not on the streets, coming from people's cars, that's for sure. They're in headphones, ipods, the shared files directory.

Sorry about the lack of action here recently. If you're hungry for grime, I recommend checking out DJ Jay DM's mix in the 1xtra garage DJ clash here. As blogland's resident popgrime whore, I'm going to big up Lethal B's new track Uh Oh, which is a slinky Stick production with the bizzle dropping extremely cute lyrics ("that went to the top ten .... and I'm gonna do it again"). Accusations that he's just recycling the same tune are obviously wrong- er, he's got at least one more banger. Mind you, his slow-jam track with Kele Le Roc is another story. It's basically her vocal called Do That Dance, on another Sticky rhythm, that's been floating around for a year, with the Bizzle dropping some disgustingly sleazy lines at the end. So greasy it could almost be fly, but personally I feel dirty after just listening to it. And not dirty in a good way either.

"Dubplate special for DJ Logan, make you rip off your shirt like Hulk Hogan". Laughing out loud thanks to D Double E.

The Essential's Remerdee on Rinse- "we're dealing with organised grime here, like Genesis". Be afraid!