(Sunday Best)

If rapping doesn’t work out, Scroobius Pip threatens to start a band of mimes

On the second Blackalicious album there’s a song where Gift Of Gab raps about the Periodic Table, proving anything can be a worthy subject for the dedicated hip hop poet. Scroobius Pip starts at hydrogen and stops at fluorine when he tries the same thing, but it’s still a noble effort. As an MC Pip is equal parts spoken-word poet on open-mic night, self-deprecating Brit-rapper and bearded prophet down from the mountain to deliver a new set of rules at us. His voice demands your full attention and repays it a thousand-fold with narratives that twist and turn as they build up to impassioned rants. Dan Le Sac gives them the varied backing they deserve, whether bleepy and nervous or blunted and calm. Whoever convinced EMI to let them sample Radiohead’s Planet Telex on Letter From God To Man, twisting it into a stuttering, shattered mess as broken as whatever it is Thom Yorke’s actually singing about, deserves some kind of award. Billy Squier’s Big Beat, over-familiar from its use by Jay Z, Kanye West, Dizzee Rascal (who they’re referencing here) and a hundred others, is both revived and rehabilitated in Fixed, which takes hammer and scalpel to hip hop in the hope of fixing it. Both Le Sac and Pip know how to use silence and the gaps between beats and breaths for effect too, which gives the points Pip reads off his stone tablet rhymebook time to hit home. When you listen to a lot of music, maybe too much, you can start feeling glad when an album ends because it means you can put on another and hear something different. When track 12 went quiet I was genuinely sad to hear the album end in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. Thank fuck for secret tracks, but more importantly thank fuck for Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip.

****½

JODY MACGREGOR

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