Sleaford Mods - The Mekon (2008)

 

I make vague efforts towards not writing the same thing week after week, and I know I covered their first one not so long ago, but Jesus this, their second album, has really got its hooks in. Everything that sounded like it was going somewhere and had probably arrived on the debut outing here comes into focus so sharp it'll have your eye out. My expectations may have been reduced by it being named after Dan Dare's cartoon enemy, but as I approach the Ozempic years, I realise I'd forgotten how the Mekon once served as the go to synonym for the absolute worst fucker you could have the misfortune to encounter. At least this was so in the West Midlands of the seventies, and I assume elsewhere. The Mekon was anyone awful beyond description - your boss, someone's shitty kid, a hated relative - and I don't remember any stronger condemnation; and this came back to me as I listened to the title track at the end of side one, a shrapnel blast of wrath over the stuff described as Liveable Shit in more recent times, weighted down with a loop of Pretty Vacant, which remains terrifying all these years later and somehow sounds even angrier here than it did back then.

We're off to a flawless start with a Rotten sample and Jason bellowing toilet over and over as we build up to Armitage Shanks, which lyrically feels like early Viz comic pushed to a harrowing extreme. Another day in the gutter, darling. Forget about it...

As with the first one, we're mostly dealing with looped samples, although there's layering, some structural work here and there - so a belated hats off to Simon Claridge, whoever he may be. Thought has gone into this so it's never just a record of loops, and the aforementioned Armitage Shanks may even have borrowed a full instrumental for all I can tell. The Sex Pistols, Nas and the Who notwithstanding, I don't immediately recognise too many of the sources and nothing gets in the way of The Mekon feeling very much in the vein of a sixties beat album in its entirety, with jazzy undertones which might be smoky were they not so fucking angry. The first version of Jobseeker builds on the Yardbirds' For Your Love to great effect and I think I prefer this version, at least once I've got past reminders of all the fun I had at Tile Hill job centre. There are plenty of memories here, mostly the kind ground into the brain like the vintage gunge around a neglected overflow - pubs with red flock wallpaper and the stench of Rothmans or JPS hitting you in the face upon entrance, synthetic carpet tiles underfoot before staggering out into halogen daylight with the manic urgency of excessive booze, a violently embittered version of the swagger promised by Oasis but nowhere near so dumb or blunted. The worst of times were the best we could manage or expect.

Then we come to Trixie with another loop which somehow improves on its source, and some of the grimmest, most depressing shit ever committed to wax; and it suddenly makes sense that the Sleaford Mods have always enjoyed a certain popularity in noise circles. It's not just the element of two blokes stood on a stage with a laptop. Trixie could be Consumer Electronics but for the repeated riff from Submission. The Mekon also makes some sense of Sleaford Mods as the English Mobb Deep - grimy as fuck, cold and relentless as daily existence, and very much rooted in its own soil.

Sleaford Mods (2007)

 

As you hopefully realise, the Sleaford Mods were Jason Williamson and various other blokes as required for a good five years before Andrew Fearne got involved, and they - or I suppose he - recorded quite a lot of material prior to Austerity Dogs bothering the hit parade. Some of this early stuff has resurfaced on compilations and bootlegs but will most likely remain obscure due to the legality of clearing all those samples, of which there are many. Anyway, someone has at last done the right thing in issuing vinyl bootlegs of the first four as originally released on CDR, so we get to hear this stuff more or less as intended in terms of artwork, running order and so on - which I personally find less confusing than assemblages such as Retweeted, I'm Not a Mod - Fuck Off and others.

...and guess what?

Contrary to any faint expectation you may have of ropy demos from before someone got their shit together, it's fucking great!

Williamson rants, yells, croons, belches, cracks jokes and delivers one lyrical wedgie after another with the same relentless wit and bile with which you will be familiar. Presumably unsure as to whether anyone was even listening at this point, if anything, he seems to give even less of a shit about sparing anyone's feelings. The music is looped samples, blatantly stolen without any attempt to disguise sources, but with just enough crafting and editing to keep it from sounding like punky Philip Glass; and while we may have noticed the looping of riffs from the Jam, the Pistols, even the Who on Retweeted, the choice of wallpaper on this debut effort is such as to leave the whole feeling distinctly jazzy, albeit in a moody sense with bars lifted from Roni Size, Bernard Herrmann, Barry White and others; and there's even a sample-free acoustic guitar instrumental, just in case you think you had the thing all figured out - and it fits right in.

Should anyone have developed the wrong impression, Sleaford Mods is no shaky beginning, no finding of feet regardless of being a quite different animal to Austerity Dogs. It's a fully formed blast of inspired racket, opprobrium - and even crooning - and as vital a debut as Bollocks, Illmatic, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, or any others you care to mention.

The Game - Jesus Piece (2012)

The Game had squirted out an entire stack of great albums by this point, not one dud amongst them, but I always had the feeling they should have been better. The problem was in the whole, with only the verbiage exposing any obvious weakness, and not in the acrobatics or even the delivery. It was the obsession with making a classic album, which is fine because no-one sets out to make a stinker, but the endless references to Ready to Die, Illmatic, Reasonable Doubt and others in terms of legendary discs which might shuffle aside to make room for this one became a bit exhausting, and he only got away with it because he sounded aspirational rather than arrogant. The endless references to records by other people became off-putting, despite the initial novelty. I once sat down with the first album and started on a list of every fan-pleasing reference made to someone else's work. I seem to remember getting to fifty or sixty before the end of the first track, at which juncture the exercise struck me as a complete waste of time. If it was a lovely day, it was a lovely day like Bill Withers. If he'd bought a brand new combine harvester you just knew he'd spent the best part of a morning searching for something to rhyme with Wurzels, because that what it be like.

Jesus Piece is his fifth album, apparently a concept jobbie exploring religious themes and how they relate to this shitty world in which we find ourselves, which I'd argue runs through most of the Game's music, although here it's more direct because we don't have to wade through references to Nas, Biggie, Jay-Z and the rest; and this greater focus, denuded of all crowd pleasing waffle, reveals a  strong lyricist delivering heartbreaking home truths with an emotional investment comparable to Ghostface. I don't know if he's ever broken down in tears on stage, but he's one of the few who could probably get away with it.

Musically, it's likewise on point, with no evidence of whatever deficit may or may not have kept previous albums from quite getting there. Being 2012, there's a lot of that post-trap sound, whatever the fuck you call it - the thing that sounds like waveforms copied and pasted from track to track on a screen which will eventually emerge from someone's shitty phone - but it has an organic groove, like headachey rainbow breakfast cereal somehow cooked up without recourse to artificial ingredients; and the sound is like something vast and distant which inhabits a cathedral more than just the usual reverb wacked up too high. Even with the earthier monologues, it's sunny and soulful music for scorching weather and wide blue skies despite the pathos, the lines drenched in sorrow, regret, or the recognition of insurmountable odds. The majority of rap albums usually leave you feeling one of two or three things, while Jesus Piece delivers every available emotion all at once regardless of contradictions - and the title track in particular is a Mona Lisa moment in rap terms. It may have taken him time to build up momentum, but I'd say this one probably does rank alongside Ready to Die, Illmatic, and the rest.

50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2003)

Now that I'm more than one-hundred years old, the majority of the music I own will be, by definition, stuff which I haven't listened to in a while, because even listening to an average five or six albums a day, there will inevitably be records which have settled, so to speak. Usually this means I get to rediscover these misplaced waxings and enjoy them all over again, and sometimes I discover qualities I didn't even notice on previous occasions and enjoy them all the more, but every so often there's an exception. The last time I tried to listen to Curtis - 50 Cent's third album, of which I had no memory and had forgotten I owned - it was hard work getting through the thing, which at least explained why I'd barely played it, and left me with the impression that he probably wasn't worth bothering with beyond that classic debut, Get Rich or Die Tryin' - with no g at the end because that's how tough guys speak, see.

Time hasn't done this one any favours either. In Da Club and 21 Questions still sound okay, I guess, and I assume the rest was once provided by how new and different it seemed at the time - now devalued in currency thanks to everything since sounding more or less like this: rap for the airwaves or the shitty little speaker on your wanky phone with da club relegated to a subject, just a hook. 50 Cent half raps, half sings, as his critics have so often pointed out, but it's more that he speaks a tune while the beats just kind of shimmer and chug in the background. Strip the vocal from a few of these and it would be anyone's guess where or who they were pitched at.

Lyrically he places himself as the third of a holy trinity behind Nas and Jay-Z, just as certain presidents will tell you what a great job they're doing which, I feel, lacks objectivity and is therefore an unreliable quantifier of worth; and 50 Cent, or Fiddy as I've no doubt hyper-talented NME writers of the day knew him, isn't terrible, but beyond the vague novelty of his speaking tunes, I have a tough time thinking of anyone less lyrical until we get to early nineties garage MCs. This is one of those guys who isn't above repeating a word at the end of two consecutive lines and so rhyming it with itself; which would be okay, except an entire album of I've shot tons of blokes in the face and the cops didn't do nuffink because I am really, really hard and that and nothing else is kind of witless; and a token track for the ladies amounting to how pet, you can suck my dick if you like doesn't really bring thematic variety. I loves me some ign'ant as much as anyone, but even rap's most celebrated cavemen can usually work a moral into the body count, something from which we might learn, or something cinematic at least - an angle which distinguishes it from being the same fucking thing over and over in a monotone with notes. Fiddy's delivery is possibly calculated to suggest the detachment of a killer—excuse me, I mean a killa, but it makes him sound like he's zonked out on dope, which is perhaps why this one was a lot more fun for him than for me.

Run DMC - Crown Royal (2001)

It wasn't exactly a comeback given that Darryl McDaniels turns up on just three tracks, having regarded the project with scepticism; but it's a great album, regardless. Run was keen to remind us of the group's significance in rap history, particularly with respect to the whole rock-rap crossover deal which had pretty much begun with Run DMC - not just Walk This Way but their whole sound which was always heavy even in the absence of guitars. Thus we get guest slots and collaborations with Kid Rock, the bloke from Limp Bizkit and other rock-rap types unlikely to have scored points in the pages of The Source; also Method Man, Fat Joe, Nas and others, because Run DMC were integral to the evolution of rap as we know it, not just the Beastie Boys. It looks a lot like the old school getting down with the kids, at least until you listen to the thing.

Contrary to what one might expect, Crown Royal was never about old guys trying to stay relevant and even without guests, these tracks are as good as anything they've ever recorded. If Run's delivery remains rooted in the old school, it wasn't like he'd ceased to evolve and expand or had lost any of his powers. This is also true of the music which kept the faith as we'd recognise it while nevertheless moving with the times - at least as of 2001. It was a new album more than it was ever an exercise in smoking a pipe and looking back with a wrinkled smile.

Of the rock-rap numbers, the collaboration with Trump's fave homeboy, Kid Rock is the one which goes hard and blows even the strongest possible objections out of the water, but none of them are surplus to requirements, even though I don't have a fucking clue who or what Sugar Ray or Third Eye Blind may be. In the name of variety, more than half the album is regular hip-hop and so we get Queen's Day featuring local lads Nas and Prodigy, effectively passing the baton, I suppose. There are two you'll need to skip. Both feature Jermaine Dupri, and if It's Over is musically decent, the Jagged Edge collaboration is a waste of both time and its half-arsed Marvin Gaye impersonation. I'm sure Dupri must have done something to justify his reputation, or at least the fact of my having heard of the fucker, but I have no idea what it might be. He doesn't actually rap on It's Over, for example, instead preferring to explain the extent of his own popularity as quantified by how much he has in his savings bank, delivered in the usual whiny voice of wasps in a jam jar somehow as a tribute to Run DMC, the logic being when someone as amazing as what I am pays a compliment then you better believe it means something; and the cunt won't shut up. Every gap created by Run pausing to draw breath is filled with Dupri reminding us how wealthy he is or just saying yeeeah in case we've stopped thinking about him. Run rhymes about buying his girlfriend a Mercedes, and we hear Dupri croaking me too in the background just in case anyone had begun to doubt his financial standing.

It could have done with a bit more Darryl, but Crown Royal remains a classic despite requiring two judicious stabs of the skip function; and with rap's increased tendency to drift off into the realm of music for furries and anime twats, we really need to remember the originators and how music works best when it does what it should do. This one does what it should do very well.

Eminem - Revival (2017)

Without bothering to do my research, I gather this was Eminem's comeback album - or possibly one of them - and was as such subject to major slagging from whatever it is that we now have which tells us whether a record is good or bad. This is what I take from listening to Kamikaze and Music to Be Murdered By, the albums which followed Revival. Of course, given Eminem's tendency to wax bitterly about how everyone hated the previous record but can nevertheless suck his dick, I don't know how much reality supports the impression I've formed because I have only the music itself to go on - which is maybe as it should be.

I have a lot of time for Eminem and have been dutifully buying each one more or less as it comes out. That said, I honestly don't believe he's the greatest MC of all time, and while he's never put out a substandard record, I'm not sure he's ever quite unleashed an all-time classic in the sense of Ready to Die, Illmatic, or Revenge of the Barracuda - although admittedly that last one may well be according to just me and WC's mum.

To take these proposals in turn, the idea of there being a single greatest MC of all time strikes me as ridiculous* given that it would entail comparisons between rappers with very little stylistic common ground beyond residence in the same unusually broad arena; and because it would mean you'd have to ask fucking stupid questions such as whether Eminem is better than Ghostface or Jadakiss, for just two of many examples. The most we can say, surely, is simply that some lyricists are great, some are less great, and some are not conspicuously great. Our man patently belongs in the upper reaches of the first bunch.

Secondly, while he has a string of great albums to his name, I don't think there's one which didn't have at least a little room for improvement in some respect. Mostly it's been a certain homogeneity across the seventy minutes of each album - or however long they are - because even genius can get a bit repetitive when it's doing the same thing for more than an hour. As I believe is fairly well established by this point, Eminem has a stylistic leaning towards the confessional and unusually personal, hence all those cuts about how you were wrong about the previous album, you cloth-eared dumbfuck, and hence his entire familial life and the drama it has entailed narrated for our consideration, blow by blow, over the last couple of decades. I've sometimes felt the confessional focus has bordered on indulgent - like all those fucking autobiographical nineties indie comics about what it's like to write and draw an indie comic - but it's what Eminem does, and honestly he does it well, so there doesn't seem to be much point in grousing about it. Either you like it or you don't. To my ears, it's mostly been his own production which has been the problem - often great tracks in isolation, but a full hour of those plinky-plonky Addams Family beats can get on your nerves after a while.

Anyway, whatever it was, Revival gets everything right leaving no room for doubt. The beats have moved on from the Slim Shady sound, not quite throwing Em's lot in with the trap crowd, but close enough as to at least sound involved in the present state of the art, at least as of 2017; and it probably helps that Rick Rubin was involved. He's still fucking with that stadium rap thing where choruses tend to invoke a skyful of lighters, and suddenly it makes more sense than it did on previous albums. The jokes are still funny or horrible - depending on your mileage - and the familiar confessional is seasoned with pointed rage over the previous year's election and all which has since spilled forth from its bright orange diaper; so Revival does more than just one thing for an entire hour, and where it does anything familiar, it does it better than the last time we heard it. I genuinely believe this one might be up there with Illmatic and the rest.

*: Even including Rakim here, regardless of the views of elderly white men who haven't listened to rap since 1991 and yet who feel somehow qualified to opine on the same in statements habitually suffixed with in my humble opinion, despite that it never is.

Canibus - Can-I-Bus (1998)

I was about to muse upon how Canibus appeared to have vanished in the wake of the first two, when a moment's online research reveals that actually he released about a million albums since this debut and seems to have done well for himself, even if it turns out I've been facing the wrong direction all of this time. Anyway, I recall that this one didn't do so well as everyone had hoped, given the lad's brief tenure as the next big thing; and he spent at least some of the follow up blaming Wyclef for fucking up the production on the first, echoing what had been said in a few of the reviews, which probably contributed to my giving it a miss. Plus Canibus seemed like a bit of a dick, at least in interview, banging on about flying saucers, freemasons and other conspiracies, qualifying this obsession by proposing that sceptics were uneducated fools who enjoyed being blind to the truth of the true facts, and so on and so forth.

Also, naming yourself after the ganja…

So once again, here I am two decades after the fact thinking, how bad could it have been?

Well, Channel Zero, in which our man explains about lost civilisations, aliens and stuff, is frankly fucking stupid, although one can't help but admire the lyrical dexterity by which he attaches this particular kick me sign to his own ass; but apart from that, Can-I-Bus is not at all what I expected. I was aware of his being a pretty decent lyricist - formidable even - and his name turns up in a few of those all-time top fifty listings. On the strength of this set, I'd say he could be top ten, not least if either Tupac or Eminem made it into any of the aforementioned listings - which I'm sure they did seeing as how they usually do. He's mostly a battle rapper, and it shows on this album, which would have been a bit monothematic except you're too busy tripping over the wordplay to notice; and extra points for the massively satisfying LL Cool J takedown. As the man says:

More lines than the bible quoted from Jesus.
More lines than a African herd of zebras.

Production-wise, sorry, but Wyclef did a great job. I don't see how it sounded too commercial - as was the accusation - in 1998, and in 2022 it may as well be an underground DJ Premier mixtape recorded direct from AM radio, just one copy owned by the artist's mum. It's a clean sound for sure, but hardly conventional or pop or mainstream beyond Wyclef presumably making sure it wouldn't scare anyone off playing it on the radio. It's not the greatest rap album ever, or the greatest debut ever, but it's fucking solid for something the artist ended up disowning; and if it failed to knock Illmatic or Ready to Die or whatever from the throne, we can at least justify Can-I-Bus named in the same sentence, which isn't too shabby.

Lil' Flip - I Need Mine $$ (2007)

As a disclaimer for the benefit of anyone reading this blog for the first time, I'm nearly a million years old, I write about what I like, and I make no claim to have had my finger on any pulse since around 1997 at the very latest. Barely literate comments along the lines of thiz opinon iz garbage Dogg Pound is tha $hit are pretty much wasted on me, even if you're not actually some little white dude lurking in his mother's basement. By the same token, I picked this one up because it was there and I enjoyed The Leprechaun. Flip could be the most successful rap artist of all time for all I know and you may already be bored shitless of the guy, but I can't really be arsed to do my research and you'll just have to humour Grandpa as he muses about this new fangled Beatles band.

No, I don't know if you're literally expected to pronounce it I Need Mine Dollar Dollar and it probably doesn't matter. The Leprechaun was decent, if not enough so to have me actively hunting down the rest. Nevertheless, this was in the rack and I had the money, so here we are.

Freestyle king or not, I don't recall Flip as being particularly gymnastic in the lyrical department, but here he's come on somewhat since the debut, and not in the direction I expected. Whenever I try to work out what happened to rap since I stopped listening - or at least got too old and too busy to continue giving it my undivided attention - I always seem to find trap music on the end of the line - guys I've never heard of growling out a few pages of bank statements over what sounds like an 808 being rogered by Sonic the Hedgehog, and all recorded on a fucking smartphone. If Lil' Flip ever went down that road, as I felt certain he probably would, there was no sign of it in 2007. Lyrically, if he's not quite Nas, you can tell he's thinking about this shit and putting in the work, developing his own voice beyond being one of those guys who turns up on someone else's CD to remind us that he also finds himself in a financially enviable situation; but two whole discs…

Not many rappers can manage the double disc thing, and yet Lil' Flip succeeds where other, possibly better publicised artists have fallen on their arses. The key seems to be variety. The standard is already high for this slightly expensive sounding album, with even those beats steering closest to the trap demonstrating a certain wide screen polish elevating them above the usual ringtones. Elsewhere we have tracks recalling the golden age of west coast g-funk and Real Hip Hop which swings across to the other side of the country, and it all blends seamlessly into a genuinely eclectic whole, feeling, if anything, a little like one of the Neptunes era Snoop albums. For someone so firmly rooted in his home soil - Houston, Texas for those unaware - Flip does a great job of covering all bases, in terms of both geography and even era, acknowledging the east coast roots of the culture as well as the usual roll call of greats; and we have guest spots from names similarly diverse as MJG, DJ Squeeky, Scott Storch, Mannie Fresh, Nate Dogg, Three-6-Mafia, Yukmouth and others. There's very little that's not to love about these - holy mother of God - thirty-nine tracks spanning social conscience to good old fashioned boasting, somehow amounting to a surprisingly soulful, feelgood set.

I probably need to have a look and see if he did any others.

Eminem - Infinite (1996)

Eminem's first album must surely be one of the most underpublicised debuts of all time, at least judging by the number of occasions I've seen it claimed that he kicked off with Slim Shady, prior to which there was just some white supremacist stuff which Ray Benzino felt duty bound to tell everyone about. Even accounts which acknowledge the existence of Infinite seem to downplay it as a stumbling ecologically themed demo dating from before our man learned how to say rude words, or even to rhyme them.

It's all bollocks. Infinite sounds very much a product of the era of Mobb Deep and Illmatic with its heavy brooding bass underscoring distant horn riffs - as distinct from the plinky-plonky Munsters themes of the more commercially viable years, despite being the work of the same people. Lyrically, it's a very different affair to Slim Shady, but then the whole point of Slim Shady was it being a character, a persona, even a parody to some extent - which is why not every last Eminem lyric since has been about taking drugs and shagging a farmyard animal. Infinite lacks the headline grabbing novelty and the delight taken in winding you up for the sake of it, but on the other hand, it's really not a massive thematic leap from the sort of more earnest, autobiographical stuff he's been focussing on since he grew out of the Esham influenced material - or at least the material which sounds as though it was influenced by Esham to me.

I love the hits as much as anyone, but this is still his greatest work in my view. The lyrical gymnastics were as spectacular as anything recorded since, and the mood - even more driven and hungry than on the Interscope albums - is crushingly powerful, soulful, funky as fuck, and all the more convincing for the absence of comedy turns to camera.

I really wonder how it all would have panned out for our man had this been the hit it absolutely deserved to be.

Jay-Z - The Blueprint III (2009)

I kept tabs on Jay-Z right up until just before this album came out, then lost the thread due to moving house, moving country, and a load of other stuff happening all at the same time, not least being marriage. Once the dust had settled, I came across this in CD Exchange. It hadn't even occurred to me that he might have kept on putting out new material in my absence, particularly given the number of times he'd already announced his retirement. My hopes weren't high given that the last two had been pretty underwhelming, but what the fuck? I thought.

It didn't make much of an impression at first, which is why I've had The Blueprint III on my shelves for a couple of years and only now have I come to play it more than twice in the same week; and yet it made some impression because I kept listening, albeit infrequently. I've had both Kingdom Come and American Gangster significantly longer and still couldn't tell you a single thing about either, except that the pillock from Coldplay is on one of them.

I always had the impression Jay-Z was on a mission to record the mythic classic rap album, solid from start to finish, the set which would hold its own alongside Illmatic and the rest. He came close more than once but I'm not convinced either The Blueprint or The Black Album ever quite got there, great though they undoubtedly were. Given how The Blueprint III follows a couple of duds and  represents the third recycling of a winning title, I had a feeling it was going to be one of those in the vein of The Dynasty which just sort of sits there between a couple of better records - not actually bad, but not something you'd necessarily bother including on your CV; but now that I've made the effort, I realise I'm wrong, and The Blueprint III may even have been his best - if not in terms of immediacy.

The standout tracks, What We Talkin' About, Empire State of Mind, and Real As It Gets are easily amongst the lad's greatest for my money, perfecting what I suppose we might as well call stadium trap - cinematic whilst somehow invoking Aaron Copland through the thoroughly contemporary orchestration - at least as of 2009 - of vaguely epic squiggles copied and pasted to different bits of a screen; and it probably helps that the rest of the record does its own thing rather than attempt to capitalise on this winning formula. No ID, Timbaland, the Neptunes and others - notably Kanye West before we all got sick of hearing about the fucker - chop up something extrapolated from that New York sound rooted in DJ Premier and the like, soulful with a lot of kick in the lower end but without necessarily covering old ground. Only Swizz Beatz lets the side down, phoning in another one of those things which sounds as though it came from the soundtrack of Jersey Shore and should rightfully be backing a loop of Deena saying something fucking stupid about how much she likes to party; but never mind. Everybody is allowed at least one clunker when the rest is good.

Lyrically speaking, Jay-Z does what he usually does, namely bigging himself up for an hour or so with a reasonable degree of wit. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, and on this occasion it works really well. Swizz Beatz aside, all the elements here add up to something greater than the sum of their parts, resulting in album of such fresh and breezy composition that it has the feeling of a debut - not bad going for a guy who had just reached the end of his second decade in the biz.

Viper - Big Tits 4 U Errday (2015)

I can see how some might have reservations about this one, but I personally take the view that Viper is simply a man who understands his audience. Big Tits 4 U Errday seems to be part of a mammary themed cycle of releases, others in the series including Suck Her Tits and Luv Dem Big Milky Tits. Without wishing to seem like some beardy hipster whose tastes are limited to whatever you've never heard of, you can probably be forgiven for being unfamiliar with these works on the grounds that no-one seems to actually know how many albums Viper has issued beyond that it's been literally thousands in the last decade, albeit as downloads. Apparently his back catalogue is therefore mostly remixes or chopped and screwed variations on a theme, but for what it's worth, this is the third I've bought at random, and there are only three tracks I recognise, or at least which appear to sample material I've already heard; and against all odds, Big Tits 4 U Errday is every bit good as You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack and Kill Urself My Man.

Viper's sound is pretty startling when you first hear it. Wikipedia defines it as cloud rap, so I looked up cloud rap but the first sentence of the article referred to cLOUDEAD so I didn't bother reading the rest.

Let's try again.

Viper's sound owes a lot to the quarter speed cough medicine beats of DJ Screw and the like, but otherwise follows its own rules. It's hypnotic like vapourwave and sounds as though it was recorded on some cheap hunk of shit which probably cost about fifteen dollars. At first it sounds like an accident, hence the dubious classification of Viper as an outsider artist, but the more you listen, the harder it is to deny his power. Viper's baritone mumble, sounding as though it was recorded over messenger on a dial-up internet connection, slows to a crawl with percussion reduced to a distant ticking and a bass so distorted that it crumbles into digital slurry and genuinely leaves the cut resembling a dreamier version of something from one of those early Nocturnal Emissions albums, or even My Bloody Valentine transposed to Texas. It shouldn't work, but having now heard three albums of this stuff, I'm forced to conclude that it's no accident and that this guy is a visionary by some definition, at least musically.

Lyrically he's maybe a little basic compared to, off the top of my head, Nas, but nevertheless cuts what is very much his own furrow. For a collection named after boobs and sporting a picture of the same on the cover - or on the associated illustration seeing as this is download only - Viper is unusually respectful regarding women, and we find neither hoes nor bitches on this album so far as I noticed.

Girls love me 'cause I'm so real,
'Cause I'm laid back, 'cause I'm so chill.
Sharing they emotions and how they really feel,
That's why, with me, they make life-long deals.

I appreciate it probably isn't the full Andrea Dworkin, but it's nevertheless a long way from Bitches Ain't Shit. The same easy-going and strangely amiable vibe informs the entire album, meaning that regardless of whether he's trying to sell us crack or otherwise telling us how amazing he is, it's really difficult to dislike Viper. He somehow manages to peddle this schtick while seeming like a nice guy, or at least like it's not anything personal. You'll doubtless be disappointed if you're expecting A Tribe Called Quest, and I suppose it's kind of annoying how the titles bear no resemblance to the tracks they describe (and there aren't any songs about tits either), but this cranky underground weirdo keeps putting out albums which are better than anything by most of the big names. Don't be mislead by the je ne sais Sunday Sport ambience of the title, Big Tits 4 U Errday is a powerfully beautiful piece of work.

Mobb Deep - The Infamous (1995)

I was kind of off the New York MCs for a while back there, mainly because every last one of them sounded like he was gargling about a pint of liquid bogies up in the back of his schnozzle, and it all seemed to blend into a generic snotty whine of some slightly bored sounding guy telling you either that his pants just fell down or that he's actually the richest man who ever lived, punctuated with sniffles. With hindsight I realise that my ear was simply pointed in the wrong direction for a couple of months, that being the direction in which one finds Noreaga, but it was enough to unfortunately dim the appeal of Mobb Deep. I'd heard them guest on other people's tracks, and whilst I could sort of see they had some use, I imagined a whole album would probably be weighed down with bogie action and would almost certainly feature a couple of tracks where the rapping was reduced to just coughing and sneezing, maybe a few of those farts you only ever hear when someone is on their death bed with the sound of some guy sobbing quietly in the background; all of which just goes to show how wrong you can be.

Musically this one represents Mobb Deep when they were at their best by my duly schooled reckoning, at their most darkly atmospheric - not quite the smokey monochrome of the jazz basement at four in the morning so much as being stood outside it in the pissing rain and freezing cold. The beats are right up front with the music as something heard in the distance, a broken piano, an echoing horn or some speaker cracking bass pumped out of a car at the lights three blocks away. For something with so few components, it's astonishing how much it does; and for something which sounded like quite a few other things from the same era - particularly as produced by Large Professor and the RZA - it's astonishing how this sounds so much like it's own thing, and how little it sounds like an album recorded two decades ago.

This is probably down to subject matter, namely the timeless theme of life kicking you in the teeth over and over, which is unfortunately as valid today as it ever was; and carries particular conviction here as Mobb Deep always sounded like they hadn't eaten for three days; and if such a description still doesn't quite do it, you can sort of reverse engineer Sleaford Mods back to this album providing you don't mind a wholesale swapping around of all the cultural references. If nothing else it at least makes more sense than Sleaford Mods as the Fall fronted by John Cooper Clarke or whatever it is this week.

As is probably obvious, it didn't take me too long to realise I was just listening to the wrong stuff where New York was concerned, and The Infamous was amongst the more simultaneously terrifying and exciting affirmations of this realisation. Twenty years later it still sounds like one of the hardest records ever made, definitely in rap terms, and certainly up there with Illmatic, Ready to Die and other more generally willingly acknowledged masterpieces. Survival of the Fittest, Temperature's Rising and Shook Ones would alone be enough to support its status, but there's a whole hour of this seriously hungry shit, and every last toot and fart of such power as to make the act of writing about it more or less redundant.

Sleaford Mods - Retweeted (2014)

When I first heard Mr. Jolly Fucker by Sleaford Mods I felt compelled to seek out more, so startled was I by the sound - so basic, so exciting, and so face-punchingly angry. Within a couple of hours of poking around on YouTube, I knew I needed to get my hands on every last squeak and fart ever recorded by this group. It was therefore a bit disappointing to realise they - or he if you insist - had already pooped out at least four albums of material that I would probably never get to hear, despite this being the age of everything that ever existed becoming available once again. I used to be so good at this sort of thing, knowing what was out there and what was what, as a stack of early Foetus singles and Unkommuniti tapes are my witness.

Retweeted, collecting the best of that early stuff, was therefore well worth the wait, and well worth the additional wait of my having to buy an amplifier and record player so I could play the thing.

I can sort of see why the band - now that there's definitely two of them - seem to have drawn a line between this - mostly Jason Williamson and others - and Austerity Dogs onwards with Andrew Fearne pushing the buttons. It's hard to tell quite what the difference is, but there definitely is one. I never quite got those Wu-Tang references mixed up with all the other efforts of everyone scrabbling to describe the band - Crass meets John Cooper Clarke, Roy Castle fronting the Fall, Swans covering Splodgenessabounds... but anyway, I can see it here, or at least I can see Sleaford Mods as more or less an English Mobb Deep - as has been mentioned in some interview or other. Even without the occasional NWA reference or Illmatic sample, it's that same sensation of taking a piss in an alley behind the kebab shop and it's raining, and you're stood in a puddle with shit shoes and wet feet...

Where the hell was I?

Much of Retweeted sounds even angrier than the recent material, at least to me, although it could be the punk rock samples, loops from various Pistols and Alternative TV records evoking certain associations with punch-ups and a surfeit of crap lager. The slightly annoying thing is that I realise I was trying to do this myself a few years ago, right down to looping Pretty Vacant in an attempt to spin my own yappy yarns of minimum wage misery with some sort of local underpinning; but not too annoying, given that the stuff on this record does it about twenty times better than I ever managed, and without trying quite so hard; and in case it needs stating, the lyrics were brilliant even back then, terrible, hilarious, and strong enough to strip the paint off most walls. The more I listen to Sleaford Mods, the more I notice how bad so much music has been for at least the last couple of decades. I suppose, if you want to get snippy, this is just some fat old codger praising music which kindly references Ronnie Biggs' Biggest Blow and other crap left laying around by my generation, and I should probably be listening to Skrillex or Neutral Milk Hotel or fucking Ha Ha Tonka - which really is the name of some band; but bollocks - simply being an old cunt with a long memory doesn't necessarily render one's experience any less valid or even vital than that of a twenty-year old told to wait another two decades before forming an opinion. So maybe this is old people's music because teenagers spend their money on ringtones of autotuned Pokémon themes rather than Sleaford Mods, but so what, and does it really matter?

Jason Williamson's sleeve notes state that he isn't particularly proud of these old tracks, which I can sort of understand, although he probably should be, not least once you consider the competition. Retweeted remains a genuine racket, a real joyful noise, and it does what music was always supposed to do, and which not much of it has been doing for a while.