Son Raw a badman driver like Tyrone
On the low-low, there’s rarely been a better time to be a fan of dusty, psychedelic boom-bap. Liberated from catering to rappers and dance floors, sample maestros are free to follow their muses into astral traveler territory, using once radical approaches as a starting point rather than an end goal. The Guardian described Anglo-Mauritian Mo Kolours’ Texture Like Sun as “the best album Curtis Mayfield never made with A Tribe Called Quest and Lee Perry” – the kind of grand comparison made for press releases, but also more than a little true, in this case. While too many of England’s rare groove pilferers sand things down to a jazzy, accessible sheen, there’s a grit to Texture Like Sun, befitting an album named after a 1970s ode to heroin that I’m fairly sure most people reading this know from Guy Ritchie’s Snatch. And like that film’s soundtrack, the looping, analogue warmth to Mo Kolours’ music isn’t there for nostalgia to soothe the tastes of well-heeled types unable to handle more aggressive, electronic tones, it’s the gangster music of days passed reinvented and reprocessed for modern ears.
“Foundation,” which we’re premiering here, is a particularly dubby number, slicing together xylophones, yardman vocals, and polyrhythms to drop you smack dab in the middle of the world’s rawest Nyabinghi jam. Those of us who miss the days when Madlib dropped a mixtape a month would do well to get familiar, this is the genuine article.
