The Roll Deep remix of Routine Check is wicked, with slick lyrics from Trim- "I take no chances and leg it, jumping cars, fences and hedges". If only everyone had a Roll Deep remix, eh.

I wonder if Riko plays Pro Evolution Soccer on Six Star level. If not, then I reckon I could merk him on Pro Evo.

Skulldisco dubstep night in Stoke Newington, with Appleblim and Shakleton. Started off tough and break-y, dark energy mash ups, which ain't really my thing really, even though I used to love brocking out back in the day, these days it no longer seems so radical to me. I guess this feeling of ennui is linked to my feeling that almost no dance music sounds alien anymore. Things progressed with Appleblim's more spacious set which slowly built up until it compressed the whole thing into Plasticman's Cha, which sounded fantastically in yer face. Some sound system style MCing which was fairly appropriate for the rectangular space. I wonder what is the ideal club-space for grimey happenings is- not sure innit. This wasn't it, but it was still OK.

Scoopex Mental Hangover. These three words, recently remembered, caused my biggest Proustian moment in quite a while.

Go cop Keith P's grime set from Culture Klash in Dallas, it's big. Mostly vocal tunes and good ones too, but with some instrumentals and MCing. The US MCs not only know all the words to the tunes, but they're lyrics are alright! They talk about merking it up and slewing wasteman, and it's sounds absolutely wicked. Interesting how adopting the London twang here works, although outsiders adopting a JA or US twang generally doesn't work. Must be because of how grime has that clenched teeth, understated succinctness going on, fitting everything into sixteen bar of screwface, so adopting the accent doesn't sound stupidly flamboyant as other instances of patois-adopting can. Anyway big up Dallas crew!

Was listening randomly to some Klashnekoff last night, not feeling his style whatseover, and trying to figure out why UK hip hop is in general feels so lifeless for me. It's not the fact that the references are UK rather than US, which has some people don't like- I don't mind that, when he says he's a black c___ out of Stokey, he says it with conviction, he gets away with it. Whereas 10 years ago, the displacing of hip hop to the UK seemed prima facie wack, now (in principle at least) the idea is OK (partly because US hip hop is pretty piss poor). It's a vernacular which could work, but when you listen to his lyrics it's filled with contentless myth-referencing- "I'm tryna walk a straight path" delivered like he's got a cross on his back, (check out the ultra-earnest 'tryna'); "I read auras and books written by forbidden government authors" (how can a government author be forbidden anyway? this is a piece of rhetoric which is superficially suggestive but you can't grasp it, apply it, you can't figure out what these books are, hence it's totally empty). I guess UK hip hop artists have to do this because their audience is relatively small, they have to try and hang their lyrics on myth, paranoia, received wisdom etc. Hence the sub Wu Tang title of Lewis Parker's old album Masquerades and Sillhouettes, which was pretty damn awful despite some excellent 12s done before hand. Anyway, UK hip hop in general seems to aspire to a kind of ersatz gravitas that doesn't sit right, it's as convincing as a UK singer doing country and western. Not entirely surprised 1 Xtra DJ Excalibah got axed either- obviously loves his thing, but too much Doc Brown and Skinnyman for me, and plus he hardly ever seemed to get any texts in during his show. Poor guy.

As for Grime being stuck in a pincer movement, I dunno, for me there has been lass of a profusion of killer tracks, that profussion characteristic of a golden age, and yet there are still developments pushing things forward. Strider's Underground has that comulsive, gutteral kick-drum, Wiley's remix of the Shank/When I'm Ere rhythm is mad hypnotic bizzness. For me it's not so much a pincer movement grime caught by a pincer movement as slowly Pincer-ing forward itself, reconstructing itself through dialectical steps.

Okay, fuck it, "dialectical" is a bullshit term to use in connection to grime, what I mean is rebuilding itself, trying new rhythms, attempting to find a new pulse now the hecticness of Forward-era grime seems somewhat exhausted.

Dubstep wise, though, Martin Clark's Keysound Radio mix is mighty impressive, a trip from bliss 'n' dread ambience into some wicked Roll Deep exclusives and an abstract refix of Crazy Titch plus loads more. The vocals (often just under the breath patois cursing) drift in and out of the beats, but retain a sort of noir-ish voiceover quality, dovetailed elegantly with industrial clangs and stuff. Crucially, there's always tension between the vocals and music. With this sort of ambient dub craft, there's a very fine line between "subtle" and "arbitrary", but here there's a tension there, albeit an understated one.

Brief thoughts on Forward (Target and DMZ). Quiet when we got there, which makes for a rather downbeat atmosphere for Target, nevertheless his elegant instrumental set kinda fits this mood. Almost all Wiley or other Roll Deep related productions, with Heat Up looming out of the mix rather brilliantly, the ultra-choppy rhythm (kinda something like Bossman's Mr DJ track) really making itself felt. Only other vocal was the Ave refix, which I still think is OK-ish, but blimey it has a lot of bass. DMZ I didn't enjoy as much, partly because for me there didn't feel like much energy in the room- if the crowd had been loving it, perhaps I would have liked it. As it is, the crowd seem rather kind of static, each dub-stepping in their own space. Apropos of this, it must be said as my mate John said, DMZ for me feels like a new, improved, retuned version of digidub; nowt wrong with that, except it seems somewhat comfortable a genre-influence for a music which want to be about pushing things FWD >>>. The MCing is kinda unsatisfactory for me on the dubstep set, but I'm not sure it's his fault. The MC the a bounce in his voice to make up for the fairly linear music. "who a want da - who a want da - who a want - da reload", almost singjay style. Really, he's more like a commentator than a storyteller, in the vein of the UK bounce MC (co. Woebot). But tonight there wasn't quite enough bounce to the ounce for me, even though that bass was heavy.

Interesting to see Buck 65 bigged up by (I think) Mike Barnes in The Wire. I've seen Buck 65 twice, first time I was kinda so-so on him, and then the second time at ATP I thought he was wonderful- as a rule I don't tend to buy into "loveable rogue" pop-personalities, although in his case I was totally sold. Of course he isn't really hip hop these days- the beats underpin the vocals, they don't work against each other like they should in hip hop, so there's none of those moments of sudden, impulsive expressiveness (anger / humour / self-assertion) that makes hip hop so good. No, everything is pre-planned here, it's writing set to music, not words plucked out of the air. The obvious comparison to make is Tom Waits, who personally I find about as exciting as the prospect of Coldplay releasing the years worth of outtakes they have in the can from their recent album. Tom Waits to me is grotesque, his characters too absurdly inflated to enjoy in any sense. All his stories seem bleak and gin-soaked, which I think I could do if I tried hard enough (and drunk enough gin). Buck 65 achieves something much harder than to be miserable, which is to be funny, which he is amazingly often. The humour is often self-deprecating, even naive (and very often nostalgic)-

"Why when I was kid, playing in the ditches Living in fear of Satan and the witches The whole world was made of wood and smelled like gasoline The days were at least twice as long and the grass was green"

Lovely line innit? I bet we've all felt like that about the days being long. Anyway, the key point here is that rather than the gallows humour of Waits, Buck 65's self-deprecation turns the humour on himself, helps to define his character (which is of course usually a naive, sincere character). Futhermore, manly, stoic understatement isn't his thing- no strong-but-silent cowboy charactures here, instead he's positively verbose, enthusisatic, wants to share, there's a sensitive side here (he talks of a "terminal case of honesty"). Of course it's all done in steady cadences and sing-song rhymes, it's resembles country music to the degree of parody. This means the layers of detail build up quickly, though- well-drawn characters, nicely structured stories. To a degree, it's more about storytelling than the stories themselves, these are flights of fantasy after all, childhood references thrown together. The satisfaction is more or less that of watching a pastiche like Sin City- the content is retro, but the structure is lovely. As an aside, the first time I saw him, he was wicked when I walked in- gangly arms shaking, quirky gags, an uptempo skank in the background. But after that the beats got slower, the stories more linear and, at the time, tedious. Nevertheless these days there's something about this sort of linearity I totally dig- these stories that ramble on and on, like good honest boots walking down the road. Buck 65 may tell shaggy dog tales, but something like his real character comes out in the telling of them.

The Essentials over the Sidewinder rhythm is the best thing ever. (19 minutes into Logan's show)

That new-ish Ruff Squad track, "Red rum backwards yeah that's murder". It sounds like Depeche Mode circa Black Celebration- overlapping, circular, epic bleakness in those keyboard lines.

Poplife has just got back off holiday. Much much more more writing soon. In the meantime, why not check out Stelfox's old blog, which seems to have undertaken a radical, not to say rather exotic, change of direction in his absence.