Rizzle Kicks: Roaring 20s – review

Sunny dispositions and chirpy tunefulness saw Rizzle Kicks achieve a double-platinum debut in 2011. Album two has the hip-hop duo filling in the background to their lives, and – you've got it – it seems the dimpled sweetness of the first record didn't tell the whole story. Roaring 20s opens with This Means War, a sketch about pint-sized gangbangers on their north London estate; it's followed by Lost Generation, a jaunty ska declaration that reality TV is used as "morphine" by young people like them. Add a handful of F-words elsewhere on the album, and there you have it: the CBeebies version of Odd Future. But while Roaring 20s fails to reposition them as badasses, it reminds us that Rizzle Kicks are generally sharp and vibrant (and well-connected: Wire actor Dominic West plays a tipsy publican on the hip-swinging Put Up Your Twos). Great one-liners tumble out ("I was more confused than all John Terry's black friends"), tunes swagger and, like the debut, the whole thing is irresistible.