The Allergies / Heartbreaker E.P.

Sometime music is surprisingly dumb and formulaic.

C’mon, admit it, DUR-DUR-WUBWUBWUBWUBWUB can get *seriously* trying after the the first few microseconds unless you’re full of more horse tranquillisers than Shergar on a comedown and ‘bootleg culture’ isn’t much better. Face it, the majority of songs which work well together, or can be ‘reinterpreted’ by banging a chunky beat and bassline underneath them is rapidly diminishing.

I like The Allergies, they seem to be one of the few using their brains whilst making music. It’s not just the same formulaic ‘take a popular song from the 60s/70s/80s and stick a wobble under it’ which seems to be all too prevalent in some scenes, but a proper cut and pasting of samples, scratches, nicely structured and usually they’re dancefloor catnip.

The E.P. kicks off with its title track, Heartbreaker, and it’s a proper toe tapping monster. Ride tapping rhythms combine sweetly with a Wilson Pickett-esque R’n’B shouter of a vocal, overlaid with Jurassic 5 style scribble scratches and snippets of ‘break’ related dialogue. So steal a phrase from the youth – Awesome-sauce.

Club Spillage is probably the weakest track on the release to my opinion (sorry guys!) – a low bpm chugger of track with a fragment of a hypnotic guitar line, some subtle hammond stabs and a pitch shifted (?) KRS-One sample. It’ s not too shabby but it plods a little in comparison to the other tracks on here.

Fortunately the heady heights of breaky hip-hoppy sampling nonsense are rapidly returned to with Seven Days – taking an Etta James vocal from a track called Seven Day Fool, and planting it squarely over a boom bap kick and snare and what sounds like the bassier half of an orchestras string section –  I swear I even heard a touch of xylophone in there, which is probably a hip-hop first.

Ever Love You plays us out. It’s another chugger, but where Club Spillage was a bit of a wet lettuce, this manages to come across with a darn sight more urgency. With a wicked US Public Information film intro warning of ‘atomic bombs’ and a quality soul shouter vocal this, in the words of Jimmy Tarbuck, is ‘a cracker’.

About djsherlockohms

Obsessive music nerd for since his formative years, Sherlock Ohms finally pulled his finger out and started inflicting his collection of Funk, Soul, Hip-hop, Reggae, Breaks, Beats and random ephemera on the unwitting public in mid-2008. Since then he's graced the airwaves of Big Chill FM and Purple Radio, the stages of the Festinho festival, and the DJ booths of the UK fluffing for the likes of DJ Moneyshot, Boca 45 and Ugly Duckling. Whether it's early morning chilled wig outs, or eclectic party starting beat fests there's a reason they call him 'No Shit Sherlock' View all posts by djsherlockohms