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I promise I didn't buy this album nor am I starting a thread on it just 'cos there's a track called 'Flyboy'.
So, new Wiley album, out at a time when some people seem to have written off grime (mostly clueless critics who were never really that informed), and even those in the scene itself or following it would admit that it's got problems - mostly the problems that come from a brief period of intense media scrutiny without any lasting real crossover success to accompany it as yet. It's also been released at pretty much exactly the same time as the new Dizzee Rascal album, which is pretty bold considering the beef between them and the fact that Dizzee is the more commercially successful and well-known of the two.
Whereas the Dizzee Rascal features collaborations with American Dirty South hip hop stars UGK (to great effect) and a certain Lallen (to what effect I don't know, and don't really want to), Playtime Is Over is a purer form of grime. That cold, brittle sound is still in effect, although it ranges from actually quite breezy and playful ('50/50') to ultra tense and paranoid ('Johnny Was A Bad Boy'). And sometimes it's a weird mix of the same, as on 'Getalong Gang', wherein Wiley cheerfully explains how he is a grumpy misanthrope. He's not the most sophisticated MC in terms of either lyrics or flow, but he does have a nice line in deadpan humour, although so far nothing on here matches "I've got a baseball bat in my car / But I use that to play baseball / Or I play rounders" from Roll Deep's 'People Don't Know'.
Nate Patrin's review at Pitchfork seems to miss a lot of points, for me - to view the breathless piling up of beat, vocal sample and Wiley's rhymes that make up 'Bow E3' as a failure ("Wiley's postal-code hood-rep is halfway submerged under Maniac's production and constantly undercut by a stuttering, omnipresent hook" - yes, exactly, it's great!) implies a failure to appreciate grime for being grime, a trap that a fair number of American critics fall into. I really think 'Bow E3' is one of the best things on this album, an awesome tune that shows what all the fuss has been about regarding this type of music.
That's enough thoughts from me for now - anyone else? |
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