Lady Sovereign

Lady Sovereign

Public Warning

Island

director's cut, Observer Music Monthly, December 10th 2006.

by Simon Reynolds

Public Warning is a paradox: a great album, but a botched debut. It’s everything the fan could have hoped for, yet it’s palpably tarnished by its tardiness. This record, you can’t help feeling, really should have come out 18 months ago, when it would have spearheaded the onslaught of grime-goes-pop bids (Kano, Roll Deep, Lethal B) and when Lady Sovereign was surfing a high tide of media buzz. By now “the multitalented munchkin” ought to be a one-woman Spice Girls phenomenon, with Sov World already in production. Arriving in the early months of 2007 Public Warning unavoidably has a last year’s thing--hell, the year before last’s thing--aura. And why the heinous, mystifying decision to release it in the UK three months after its American release? Were Sov's minders thinking they should wait until grime's profile sank to zero and then re-launch her as a US-anointed star? The press release  for Warning trumpets its #48  Billboard Chart entry and 20 thousand first week sales, but what that really means is that hardcore British fans will have bought the import or, more likely, downloaded it illegally months before the record even comes out in Sov’s homeland. 

But enough about hype and strategy, what about the would-be pop artifact itself? From production to persona, rhymes to flow, Public Warning is almost flawless. Three years since she first stung ours ears with “Ch Ching,” it’s still pure delight to hear Louise Harman mangle language as she shifts back and forth her two modes of tautly-drawled nasal insolence and slack ‘n’ gravelly ragga menace. So deft is her flair for alliteration she can't help signposting it with an interpolation of “Peter Piper picked a pickled pepper"  in one song and “she sells sea-shells by the sea shore” in another. And she subjects vowel sounds to Abu Ghraib-degrees of contortion--just check the stretched “u”'s in the “9 to 5” verse that rhymes “huge”, “rude”, “food”, “Red Bull” and “Channel U”. 

So deliriously pleasurable is the sound of Sov that you often glaze out on the sense of her words, which--when they’re not bigging herself up on tunes like “A Little Bit of Shhh” or the Prodigy-goes-2-Tone title track--are as keenly observed as Mike Skinner’s. “Gatheration” sketches an impromptu house party at Sov’s “yard”, while the hilarious “My England” skewers American Anglophile illusions about this country: “we don’t all have bowler hats and hire servants/More like 24 hour surveillance and dogshit on the pavements”, declares Sov, before spurning croquet for Playstation and scones for “someone’s fresh homegrown.” There’s more local colour in the obligatory US hip hop-style reminiscence “Those Were The Days”, Sov recalling youthful larks--“racing down the hill in Safeway trolleys”--on the Chalk Hill estate in North London. 

Sov’s signature blend of vivacious and vicious sometimes brings to mind that old Monty Python sketch inspired by the Kray Twins, in which the most fearsome sibling isn’t the brother who wields ultraviolence but the ones who uses sarcasm. She may be tiny and intensely charming, but I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her. “Tango Man” reminds you of teenage girls’ capacity for verbal cruelty, taunting an ex-friend who overdid the fake tan (she gets compares to baked beans in an English breakfast at one point) while the growly thunder of Sov’s vocal on “A Little Bit of Shhh” gives teeth to the aside “don’t joke with us small folk.” The bass-booming “Fiddle With the Volume” is an incitement to ASBO--“abuse your speakers, lose your manners/disturb the neighbours, this one’s a banger”--and makes you briefly envisage this rude girl as an icon for our contemporary culture of incivility and public disorder. But then there’s “Hoodie”--not, as you’d expect from the title, a defiant anthem for UK’s new folk devil, the hood-wearing, mall-stalking chav, but actually a celebration of Sov’s own brand of grrl power, in which the unisex hip hop clothes of trainers and hooded sweatshirt is simply more practical for active pursuits like dancing than the sexed-up club babe look. Riding a lithe beat so swinging and innocently exuberant it’s almost Sixties in feel, the gorgeous chorus  “fling on an Adidas hoodie and just boogie-woogie with me” reminds you that young people haven’t really changed. They still want to “get loose,” as Sov sings it, dance their way out of their constrictions.

                                                                  

dance 98

Dance acts at CMJ  1998 alternative music seminar  

Village Voice November 17th, 1998 

by Simon Reynolds


It's been a year of musical agnosticism, with no single zone of sonic activity compelling enough to warrant monomania. Indie-rock hipsters are now as likely to check out dance music, while club-music mags, responding to the ennui engendered by a decade of dance-and-drug culture, are broadening their coverage to include rock: usually instrumentalists such as Tortoise and Fridge, but sometimes proper bands, like The Verve or Spiritualized, who have some kind of narco-spiritual kinship with rave. Given this backdrop of confusion, perhaps it's not surprising that this year's CMJ featured almost as much top DJ talent as the Miami Winter Dance conference.

At Bowery Ballroom Wednesday, Lo-Fidelity Allstars made a brave but clumsy stab at incorporating the science of dance music into the attack of rock'n'roll. The band's debut, How To Operate With a Blown Mind, is an oxymoronic masterpiece of "darkside big beat," documenting the normalized malaise of British polydrug culture, where clubbers boast about getting "messy" on a cocktail of diverse chemicals. Onstage, unfortunately, the band's rave'n'roll hybrid offers neither the machinelike precision of a DJ nor the charismatic spectacle of a band. Still, the vandalized disco of "Blisters on My Brain" dazzled the ears like the Gallic glitterball house of Stardust and Daft Punk.

That same night, Speeed's four-floor, 24-DJ extravaganza promised big fun, but actually delivered (thanks to oddly sparse attendance) a disappointingly vibeless experience. In the cavernous, almost deserted basement, U.S. house gods Deep Dish wove an alternately honeydewed and harsh web of textured rhythm; later, "surprise guests" Sasha & Digweed, accustomed to audiences of several thousand, attempted to please a crowd that was simply absent. 

Elsewhere, old-skool nostalgia seemed to be the ruling flavor: Monkey Mafia's Jon Carter played a very peculiar remix of Prince's "When Doves Cry," Les Rhythmes Digitales's Jacques Lu Cont offered a pitched-up, helium-squeaky version of A Guy Called Gerald's "Voodoo Ray," and Glasgow's DJ Q dropped a crisp and spangly selection of disco cut-ups and filtered house. Just about the only breath of techno futurism came from Moby, who climaxed his set with a searingly celestial trance track, origin unknown.

Some of the week's best action was at parties not listed in the official program, but loosely affiliated to the schmooze fest and free to badge holders. On Thursday, New York hardcore techno label Industrial Strength brought gabba to the Sapphire Lounge. Lenny Dee resurrected the bombastic Belgian techno vibe of Brooklyn warehouse parties circa 1991; Parisian DJ Manu Le Malin stressed gabba's claims on the phuture with punishing yet atmospheric gloomcore. Later that night, Paul Oakenfold and sidekick Dave Ralph pleasured a packed Irving Plaza with sets of epic house and melodic trance that alternately tugged at the heartstrings (twinkly, plangent riffs) and insulted the intelligence (schlocky grand piano chords, Enya-esque Celt-diva vocals).

Like the Lo-fi's mishmash on Wednesday, the lineup at Irving Plaza on Saturday exposed the fallibility of live techno. Instead of transcendently tweaked-out turntablizm, Josh Wink opted for fitful, real-time performance of his own music. Then industrial dance veterans Meat Beat Manifesto churned out one torpid-tempo'd, quasi-funky track after another, making you wonder why main man Jack Dangers bothers hiring a live drummer if he just sounds like a state-of-the-art-circa-1990 breakbeat loop. With the post-MBM set from Wink never materializing, the night ultimately confirmed a stubborn truth about dance music: with scant few exceptions, it's a DJ thing. 

choppage

Various Artists

Troubled Waters

Offshore Recordings

Village Voice, September 7th 2004

by Simon Reynolds

Drum ‘n’ bass always prided itself on being vanguard music, perpetually moving forward. Six years ago, though, the music reached a frenetic standstill, a treadmill churn of jacknifing beats and bass-riffs like endless anagrams of the same doom-blare notes. When lapsed believers (such as me) squabble with still-believers, it's like Led Zep fans arguing with Iron Maiden supporters: no, no, can't you see, it's not the same thing AT ALL! 

Built entirely from tracks on his label Offshore, New York deejay Clever's mix-CD is so refreshing because it makes like the last six years never happened. The Offshore sound takes off from the genre's moment of supreme musical ripeness, when beats were densely micro-edited but still swinging: the hyper-syncopated drum talk and lush 'n' eerie textures of Source Direct and 4 Hero. New output from veterans of that time (Deep Blue and Justice, associated with once peerless label Moving Shadow) appears on Troubled Waters alongside tracks by brilliant younger producers like Paradox and Sileni (whose "Twitchy Droid Leg" is title of the year). 

Seamlessly mixed (quite a feat given that almost everything Clever's young label has released is on this CD) Troubled Waters propels you on DJ culture’s proverbial “journey”--in this case, a thrilling ride across dark and light, frenzy and serenity. And Clever will be doing it live on Friday September 17 at Spill (196 Orchard Street), sharing the bill with Chris Walton of Inperspective Records--Offshore's London ally in the resurgence of breakbeats that actually break and basslines that move inside the groove.