Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.
Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brilliance
There was once a time when grime music was very angry, and very threatening, but that seems a long time ago now. Today, Dizzee Rascal is less a herald of riot and revolt, and more of a national treasure, exuding charm from every pore, even if his music has become increasing predictable and safe. But, as wordsmith and dancer Debris Stevenson proves in her debut play, Poet in da Corner, Dizzee Rascal still can change minds and influence people.
The Bass Defence League campaigns for mental health. As with everything Big Narstie does, there are serious points in this release wedged next to the broadest comedy, and it’s no coincidence, as we learn from the vivid parody of “BDL Protest” intro skit, that BDL is only a letter away from EDL.
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.
SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017
Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary things
In the four years since Dizzee Rascal’s last album the landscape around grime has changed. In 2013 grime MCs were busy hooking up with as many pop stars as possible, fusing their machine-gun lyricism with Autotune-addled pap pop. A Dizzee single from that time even featured a collaboration with Robbie Williams. With the ascent of Skepta, Stormzy, Jme, Novelist et al, grime has partly returned to its original fusion of spiky word-flow and caustic electronics. Dizzee’s been listening. His sixth album showcases an MC determined to astonish, and succeeding.
The best those turning to Raskit for cheery choruses will find is the jovial, somewhat throwaway “She Knows What She Wants”. For the rest, the density of the verbiage is, well, dizzying. For 16 songs it’s a relentless, complex onslaught, interweaving boasts, gags, narratives and point-making, backed by tracks that often have an ominous, post-trap/dubstep power, from the cinematic John Carpenter-esque soundbed for “I Ain’t Gonna Lie” to the flightier, flute motif on “Ghost”.
The music’s created by American beat-makers such as Skrillex associate Valentino Khan, Texan Whiz Khalifa discovery Cardo, and leading hip hop remixer Paul Salva, but it’s Dizzee Rascal who’s firmly centre-stage. He opens a window on his reality and doesn't allow the listener to turn away. He stares career collapse in the face on “Wot U Gonna Do?”, rages at the Tories on “Everything Must Go” (“All I can see I politicians running round trying to keep their pockets jingling”), rages at everything on “Sick a Dis”, gets slower and funky of the closing “Way I Am” and “Man of the Hour”, and harks back with brilliant lyricism to a fried chicken joint near where he grew up on “Bop’n’Keep It Dippin’”. And that's just a smidgin of the whole thing's sprawling, motormouthed ambition.
Raskit is a showcase, explicitly suggesting its maker has returned to claim his crown. Such is its dextrousness, the plate-spinning nerve with which Dizzee Rascal juggles metaphors, analogies, poetic twists and comic detail, that anyone who’s ruled him out of the game will find their own called into question.
Overleaf: Watch the video for Dizzee Rascal "Wot U Gonna Do"
So where’s Devlin been? Last heard of four years ago, he was hot property on the back of two critically acclaimed, commercially successful albums. He was Dagenham’s own Eminem, the only white guy in the grime crossover A-league, yet it’s peers such as Skepta, Wiley, and Wretch 32 who are now the big names. So what happened?
The flaming pigtails say it all. More St Trinian’s than gangsta, the 23-year-old Croydon rapper Nadia Rose presents (mostly) the lighter side of South London street life. Despite a less than incendiary last place in the BBC’s recent Sound of 2017 competition, Rose had already captured enough attention for Highly Flammable to catch fire with “Boom” and “Station”, 2015’s two feisty singles. They were both a bit rough round the edges but throbbing with the sort of attitude that captures an audience.
Much like the year itself, 2016's strongest albums tapped into a spirit of restlessness, defiance and disorientation. But unlike the punk explosion of 1977, there was no real sound or even genre that this mood of rebellion cohered around.
Around the turn of the millennium, two producers – the Californian Otis Jackson Jr aka Madlib, and the late James Yancey aka J Dilla from Detroit – started a revolution in hip hop: knocking beat patterns off the musical grid, searching further and wider than before for obscure and psychedelic sample sources, and generally making things weird and wonky.
A few beers down, in the middle of a crowd listening to music you love, you tend not to think of the latest news story as your highest priority. But Britain's relationship to Europe weighs heavy on the mind these days, and when the news of the violent attack on Jo Cox started filtering through as we danced under the Catalan sun on Thursday afternoon, it threw the nature of Sónar festival into relief.