(Sunday Best/Shock)

Scroobius Pip, still talking to the kids

The curse of the rapper and the poet is running out of words. Jay-Z’s early work was dictionary-thick, but now it’s so sparse you could move furniture around inside it. Scroobius Pip, the mouthy half of this duo, may rap, “I write more quotes than a fuckin’ big book of quotes” but he has less to say than he did on the first album. There are some tracks where he smacks you around with delirious torrents of vocab, but there are fewer of his Old Testament rants with jokes and more repetition. He’s kept his gift for two-sided narratives that surprise you in the second half, but Dan Le Sac’s musical contributions are the more impressive ones this time. As well as the kind of speedy techno beats only a wordy rapper like Pip could rhyme over, he shows off his love of Radiohead with Five Minutes, which could be a leftover cut from Kid A, and there’s drum & bass and Italo disco in the mix as well. Pip’s at his best when there’s messages in the music – he even manages a verse about safe sex in lead single Get Better without sounding like Willy Condom & Contraception Crew coming to your school – but when he tackles knife crime and domestic violence he does so with less of their trademark humour. It made some write them off as a novelty, but wit sweetened those bitter pills and with more of it the duo would be able to take Pip’s advice and Get (even) Better themselves.

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JODY MACGREGOR

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