Pharoahe Monch
Desire (Island), £10.99
Unless he gets irradiated, grows 20 times bigger and starts stomping on buildings in his native New York, rapper Pharoahe Monch will never overshadow his 1999 hit 'Simon Says', with its monstrous horn sample lifted from the Godzilla soundtrack. Dancefloors are still juddering from those fearsome horns, but in the intervening eight years an ominous hush has fallen over the song's author.
Troy Donald Jamerson first made a noise in the early Nineties with the groundbreaking hip-hop outfit Organized Konfusion, when he proved himself to be one of the most adroit and intelligent lyricists - if not the greatest speller - of his generation. Pharoahe went on to release a superior solo album at the tail-end of the decade, but since Internal Affairs, things have been all too quiet in the Jamerson household.
Label politics forced him to shelve a project in 2005. Writing for last year's P Diddy album marked a further low, albeit a lucrative one, but now, finally, Pharoahe Monch is back with a second album. So was Desire worth the eight-year wait?
The brilliant, Elvis-channelling new single 'Body Baby' screams 'Yes!'. With its finger-snapping beat, tumbling piano and a spirited impersonation of the King on the chorus, it's as catchy as hell and Monch patterns his razor-sharp verses with gleeful invention.
When he gets political on 'Free' and 'When the Gun Draws' - in which he imagines himself as a bullet in flight - Monch does so with precision and authority; it is apt that he has chosen to (very effectively) re-engineer 'Welcome to the Terrordome' by those masters of the hip-hop polemic, Public Enemy.
It's not all brooding social commentary, though. Whereas Internal Affairs put a sharp edge on the late-Nineties underground sound, this album flaunts the sort of super-slick production usually found on a Jay-Z party record. Some of its weaker moments, and that includes the title track, involve speededup soul samples and braggadocio, but for the most part, Desire is executed with great flair. When it comes to wedding the introspection of 'backpack' hip hop to the extroversion of the mainstream, Kanye West usually claims the role of head officiator. He'll need a whole new set of robes now that Pharoahe Monch is back in order.
