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’.
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