Romare
Roots (Ninja Tune)
Earlier this year, Jamie xx released All Under One Roof Raving, a song that traced the roots of British club culture through vintage rave beats and archive clips of pilled-up punters in Kickers hoodies screaming their allegiance to the church of the DJ. Although a less explicit history lesson, Roots does the same thing for black American dance culture. Flashes of juke, footwork, Chicago house and Dixieland all come into focus during an eight-minute concurrent, rather than sequential, history of music. Basically, like that Doctor Who episode where Churchill was a Roman emperor and Charles Dickens wrote TV shows but, you know, signed to Ninja Tune.
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
Linkin Park
Rebellion (Warners)
Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory is one of the top five best-selling albums of the 21st century. The band are phenomenally successful, each of them multi-millionaires. So why does this sound indistinguishable from any Year 11 metal band who learned their riffs from a burned CDR of Toxicity? Even the official lyric video looks like it was knocked up in 20 minutes on PowerPoint. Either this entire band are coming down with a case of the Benjamin Buttons or they all quit years ago and the label got some minimum-wage Saturday-job kids to fill in and see if anyone noticed.
Kero Kero Bonito
Build It Up (Kero Kero Bonito)
Some people think the PC Music label is the most groundbreaking thing to happen to electronic music in years, a childlike exploration of bubblegum pop, MySpace aesthetics and all the girly bits of UK garage. Others think it’s a bunch of bored hipsters trying do the most ridiculous stuff they can think of and see what they get away with. South London’s Kero Kero Bonito suggest that those standpoints don’t have to be mutually exclusive: Build It Up is a hyper-cute bilingual song that sounds like it was written by a bi-curious Toad from Super Mario and that primary school teacher from Balamory. If these are the emperor’s new clothes, then they look super adorable.
Jessie J Feat 2 Chainz
Burnin’ Up (Republic Records)
“Mandem”, “brrrap” and “bl-bling bl-bling” are all things Jessie J thinks she’s entitled to say because, bruv, she’s well hip-hop. Pretty quickly the British public realised that a woman who made her name writing songs for Disney-era Miley Cyrus and gets booked to play Radio 2’s Big Day In The Park has limited legitimate claim to a “street” vernacular. So nothing is more infuriating than seeing that she’s managed to mislead Americans about her UK credibility long enough to make a song with actual 2 Chainz. It’s like telling a small child to stop making farting noises with their armpit, then Chris Rock popping up and saying those farting noises are the funniest thing he’s ever heard. Stop encouraging her, it’ll only make it worse.
