So here we go - The guardian's favourite British MC (maybe?). I've heard a few RM tracks on other places but never a full album. Being a terrible music snob if you'd asked me before this I would said that he was pretty bad - The sort of hip hop that someone that doesn't like hip hop listens to etc etc. I thought this could go two ways: 1. It would be as terrible as I pre-conceived it to be and I would smugly report how bad it was. 2. It would be great and I would eat my words. Unfortunately neither seemed to be true, and it ended up being good but nothing exceptional.
The key problem for me was both that a) RM has a rapping style which is pretty tedious. Not terrible, but nothing special and worse b) the production on this is so boring. Clearly I am biased to a certain style of production - snares, drums and samples and the like. I think that if you're going to stray from this style then you either need to be a really good MC (Doom gets away with it for example), or the production needs to be really good.
Witness (1 Hope), shows how this could work - the production is tight and merges with his rapping really well and gets your head nodding. Ital Visions, though, doesn't work - the production is washy and RM just talks over it - compare this with the track he did on the Skitz record which had a similar rapping style but way better production and it just comes away broken.
Two tracks that feature guests (Charli 2na and Rodney P to be specific), for me show up RM as an average rapper, Charli hitting the production like a pro and Rodney P as usual blowing everything out of the water without even thinking about it.
RM then commits a cardinal rap sin: the "courting track". There are a few places that rappers go which is very dangerous ground. Trying to do comedy rap is incredibly difficult and rarely comes off. Ditto for tracks describing the deed. The production is kind of weird and the lyrics creepy, and that chorus is utter shit. "Take a little peek under that frock tonight" sounds like some kind of weird stalker. But anyway this is not terrible and listening to it out of the context of the project I may have liked it more - but there's nothing here that hasn't gone before (and done a little better), means that this one just washed over me. Still not as good as Braintax.
Having been a bit blah'd by the album - this video's pretty good:
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