Missy Elliott - The Cookbook (2005)

 

Excepting Tinchy Stryder and those who came in sideways from either garage or hanging out with Calvin Harris, I've generally thought of rap-rave hybrids as an abomination based on Missy's reasonable but disappointing So Addictive and Puffy's rave album - which was ill-advised even by his standards. It feels like good ideas retooled for a shitty weekend in Blackpool, music for Jersey Shore-based ennatainment sponges, and so I picked this up out of a sense of loyalty more than anything because how bad could it be?

It seems I'd missed a couple of albums in the wake of So Addictive during which she apparently got her shit together with a few overdue reminders of where rap came from. So by the time we get to this one we're back in business against all my expectations, which is one hell of a relief. At first it sounds like an exercise in nostalgia with contemporary (as of twenty years ago) touches, but it spreads and grows and becomes very much its own thing. The old school affectations are upfront with guest spots from Slick Rick among other less obvious choices, borrowing Apache from the Incredible Bongo Band via Sugarhill, and backtracking the rave element to the bass music spawned by Planet Rock, saving ecstacy references from referring entirely to things other than the experience of being very, very, very happy about something; so the whole is more of an homage than doing a Showaddywaddy in rap terms. The production sparkles with feeling in keeping with the culinary metaphors for music as soul food with the usually ubiquitous Timbaland taking a back seat, leaving the left field squelch and crunk to the Neptunes and others, notably Rich Harrison who is still chucking a drum kit down a fire escape and somehow turning it into the funkiest fucking thing on Earth*; a dynamic which is powerfully echoed on Bad Man, also featuring Vybez Cartel and which feels like getting caught in the world's worst hailstorm, but with timpanis and kettle drums instead of wee lumps of ice. Even with all this technological overload, much of The Cookbook excels in its simplicity, reminding us that rap can be just a rock hard beat with lyrics and the occasional hoot of a horn section.

The Cookbook is more or less a perfect album, one of those that feels like it does you good as you listen; and being as she hasn't released much since, maybe Missy thought so too, possibly realising she'd never be able to top this; also meaning I get to be down with the yoots dem by writing about the latest album from, even though it came out two decades ago. Missy always had a fantastic voice and things to be said, should that need stating, and here's where she said them best.

*: I say still because I've only just heard this album, although to be fair Rich Harrison spent much of 2005 chucking a drum kit down a fire escape and somehow turning it into the funkiest fucking thing on Earth.

Jethro Tull - Benefit (1970)

Having already grimaced at length on the subject of my tenuous relationship with Jethro Tull back in 2021, I'll add only that my current working theory is that you're probably safe with anything recorded prior to 1973, beyond which it begins to feel like school at the weekend. Benefit, picked up cheap out of curiosity mainly because it was there, seems to support this theory. It arguably lacks the manic energy of This Was, and those Open University maths modules were beginning to make themselves felt in the composition, but it hasn't yet turned into something with which to beat listeners over the head. They had spent a lot of time on tour in the US with Led Zeppelin and the like, and the influence of this excursion is felt in songs turning out extra-English. We still have something of the influence of jazz, blues, folk and the rest, with everything blended so finely as to have become its own flavour with occasional Renaissance frills taking us outside the usual 4/4 expectations and a mix that serves to remind that it wasn't always about sheer volume. It's an unmistakably English sound with few traces of Chuck Berry, and not just English, but specifically the rural English of haystacks, birdsong, hedgerows, woolly jumpers in the pissing rain, and pubs which have been in business at least since the crusades. Even if it gets a mention, there's not much trace of London Town to be found, and it leaves me feeling weirdly nostalgic for my childhood which felt very much like this album in some respects.

Everything you hear on this record would be developed further into ever more ornate conventions until the element of soul had been reduced to an equation which only worked because Ian was right there in front of the microphone telling you how important it was and so insisting you shut up and pay attention; but on Benefit it's still fresh, sparkling in both sun and rain, reviving the spirit and reminding us of what matters in this life.

Remember Englishness? Having moved to the US some fifteen years ago, it's not anything to which I give much thought, but fuck - it's wonderful to experience music so honest, so free of artifice, with such a good heart, that reminds me of how England felt without needing to push down on anyone, without any weird parochial agenda, without some fat skinhead twat from Surrey (off the top of my head) fog-horning on about this week's scapegoat.

Given previously stated reservations about this lot, it's lovely to discover I was wrong.

Pete Hope - Wrong Blues (2025)

 

It's rare that I get an album first time I hear it, and usually it takes three or four plays to make sense, often more. I'm still trying to connect with that final Shellac album, for example. Wrong Blues however is one of those rare exceptions, sounding reasonably incredible the very first time it travelled up the old school wires and into my brain. I'm not even sure exactly why. The sound is minimal and arguably rough as fuck with mains hum, hiss, and mild distortion contributing to the ambience as much as any of the instruments - if they are instruments. Some tracks are just a voice, but here and there we get what might be a guitar or might just as easily be broken strings stretched across an old tin bath, and there's a kick drum which sounds like a hobnail boot against a box of rusty tools. There are electronics of the screwdriver in the radio variety and sparing use of rudimentary effects, in case anyone is worried, but mostly it could have been recorded - possibly on a mono portable tape recorder with a condenser mic - at more or less any point since 1960. None of this is an affectation, so far as I can tell. It's why the music works, and I'm reminded of Billy Childish insisting that all you really need is a microphone plugged into something that records sound, and if what you're doing is any good, then you'll need nothing more.

With such a basic sound, the emotive force here is carried by the voice, no stranger to booze, ciggies or grinding hardship I would guess, with even incidental half-heard sounds of metal objects rattling around delivering the soul punch you'd expect of a well rehearsed horn section. It's the sound of those old blues musicians before anyone coaxed them into fancy studios, and - at the other extreme - if you can handle Einstürzende Neubauten or SPK back when they were an atrocious fucking noise, Wrong Blues doesn't sound like either, but the mood is of equivalent density and you'll probably enjoy this too. Should anyone have forgotten, the blues isn't pharmaceutical television advertising featuring smiling eldsters jamming in the park, it's what comes out when life hits you right in the fucking face over and over and over, and it's captured right here should any bright young things need a reminder.

My personal favourites are Toxic Blues, Hope in Hell, Hello My Little Maniac and Flask Blues, most of which benefit from a supporting din that stands in for whatever more traditional sound you might have anticipated, but Wrong Blues really needs to be heard in its entirety for the full benefit, not least for the red raw vocal litany. This is what music sounded like before it was repackaged and sold back to us as product.

Outstanding.

Get it here straight from the source.

In the Nursery - When Cherished Dreams Come True (1983)

Here's another one to which my pocket money didn't quite stretch at the time, despite how much I loved Witness, the single which came out the following year and ended up on just about every compilation I taped for anyone for at least the next five. Of all the groups to fall victim to ill-fitting characterisation, In the Nursery must surely rank among the highest, having started off as one of those Joy Division bands before evolving into one of those Laibach bands, then neo-classical, martial industrial, and so on and so forth, because someone somewhere will just have heard Elgar for the first time and decided that Sir Edward was himself a martial industrial pioneer. Cherished Dreams dates from their time as one of those Joy Division bands, although for what it's worth it reminds me of A Certain Ratio if it reminds me of anyone, or even Adrian Borland's Sound on Mystery in particular.

The confusion possibly stems from their interest in aesthetics as art in the formal sense, hailing as they do from an era where your fave bands would usually turn you on to what they'd been reading or some overlooked detail in the history of painting or film - I mean as distinct from just rocking out and so inspiring you towards the purchase of recordings by other artists who also rock out. Given their extended legacy of soundtrack work and film scores, combined with a strong visual - or at least poetic aesthetic - it should be clear that this is art, and as art it is very much its own thing in the sense of those associated with modernism being very much their own respective things; or to put it in less nebulous terms, if you can imagine Spandau Ballet with content rather than just style, then maybe that's what I'm getting at.

These six tracks are songs in the traditional sense, brought together by means of an experimental approach utilising whatever best approximates whichever theme they're going for - powerful emotive bass, military rhythms, horns, heroic crooning, funky guitar, and even what is almost certainly a Roland DR55 invoking a timeless sense of scale with surprisingly little. It sounds like the labour of love I strongly suspect it to be, meticulously sculpted rather than offered as here's some stuff we done innit; and the apparently silk-screen printed gatefold cover seems likewise true to the integrity of their aesthetic over commercial considerations.

When Cherished Dreams Come True is probably overdue a reissue but in the meantime I'll get onto tracking down their other records which I couldn't afford at the time.

The Best of New York Haunted part one (2025)

As younger readers may recall - assuming they even exist - I don't really do downloads, and if I do, I tend to burn a CDR of the thing so I can listen to it without having to buy something which may facilitate listening for about three months before breaking down because I failed to neosync the datawrap - even though no-one alive actually knows what that means. I therefore have a strong preference for physical media.

Unfortunately, almost everything released by New York Haunted seems to be fucking fantastic, which is inconvenient for me because the label is mostly, almost exclusively about the downloads, and my CDR burner is knackered. Naturally I snapped up this token material exception during the seven or eight seconds of it being available, however long it was. New York Haunted is still all about the downloads, but hopefully this represents a testing of the water.

The Best of New York Haunted is a short, snappy album produced as bespoke vinyl by some new operation called Elastic Stage who specialise in this sort of thing. If it's a lathe cut, it's the best sounding lathe cut I've heard, but I'm not sure it is given production values equivalent to something for which you would pay full price in a store. The four tracks assembled here were apparently the label's most downloaded at time of release, and given the part one suffix I'm hoping this is going to be a regular thing.

If it means anything, these four come from downloads by Club Mayz, Kuvera B x Dylab, Nachtwald, and Demented Machine, all providing variants on the dark, dirty techno for which the label is known - mixing desk thick with grease, everything in the fucking red and held together with duct tape, kick drum more like assault with a rubber mallet lacking the decency to even observe the tradition of four to the floor. It combines euphoria with anxiety in a sort of primal horror you can dance to and is the very embodiment of dystopian. I don't know. You run out of words for this sort of thing, although if it helps the music is beautifully fitted to the artwork - AI generated cyborgs crumbling and rotting, humanity reduced to trypophobia triggering consumer tech, and probably the first time I've ever seen AI used to generate art that isn't the usual pile of wank. This is what acid does these days, and I doubt anyone at the desk back in 1987 could have predicted it. I'd say grab one but it seems to have already come and gone, so just be aware.

Extra points to Nachtwald for a track named Learn From History You Idiots. 

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.

Martha & the Muffins - Metro Music (1980)

If they are remembered at all, I suspect Martha & the Muffins have been reduced mainly to a question in a pub trivia quiz with vague suggestions of a time when new wave was angular, quirky, and wore a skinny tie; although to be fair, it was four fucking decades ago. Like everyone, I thought Echo Beach was great, but retained impressions beyond the token hit single thanks to my record collecting pal at school who obsessively snapped up subsequent singles by anyone whose debut smash had already found its way into his heart, particularly if coloured vinyl was involved. So I dutifully borrowed and taped the five or six which came after Echo Beach along with the b-sides because - who knows? - just in case, and life went on.

Recently going through old tapes - all of which still play just fine, thank you very much - listening to Saigon again, not having heard it in maybe thirty years or more, was like being punched in the face. The song chugs along on its tidy wee new wave beat, keyboard wistfully keening away in the background, and then we come to the end of the verse and that riff is like going over the humpback of a rollercoaster just as the amphetamine hits. I was aware of there having been an album or two and had vague memories of studying the sleeves in record stores, specifically HMV in Coventry. It seemed like further investigation was long overdue.

The production is slightly flat, underscoring the illusion of the tidy little college band in shiny shoes playing their songs for you, but this only means it takes longer for the magic to work its way through; and the more you listen, the more it seems like the Muffins were at least a Canadian equivalent of the Talking Heads, probably more jagged than they sound here but nevertheless something which conveniently coincided with the mainstream more than played up to it. We're not quite talking Devo, but we're definitely not talking Huey Lewis and the fucking News. Behind the radio friendly mix, the instrumentation is pretty wild, peppering all manner of structural somersaults with blasts of jazzy noise, and offsetting squeals of the unexpected against metronomic repetition of a kind which would doubtless have beardy old men wetting themselves had it been originated in Düsseldorf in the seventies. I suspect this band were not served well by their own billing which seemed to miss everything that made them worth hearing, and surely the Peter Saville sleeve should have been a clue.