Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip: 'Angles'

The question of how to follow a single of the calibre and impact of 'Thou Shalt Always Kill' is a crippling thing that these two talents have had to face up to.

The track is included on their debut album and it still has scarcely a whiff of novelty about it, a song that is still at once witty and mystifying with a jolly punch of a beat, adorned with squiggles and multi-coloured delights a plenty. It was perhaps a bigger hit with “indie” kids and “indie” press than it was with the hip-hop fans and it isn’t hard to see why. Making reference to just about every holy cow of guitar music going - “Radiohead? Just a band, The Arctic Monkeys? Just a band” etc - it even takes a pot shot at indie rag/bible (delete as per your perspective) the NME.

The album is expertly sequenced, opening in the strongest terms with the clarion call of 'The Beat That My Heart Skipped', which begins with MC Scroobius Pip (a name he lifted from an unfinished Edward Lear poem) giving us a brief mission statement that is blessed with the same infectiously jovial production style first honed by Le Sac on the aforementioned hit. And at the crucial point around which longer albums start to lag, there is a late surge in 'Back From Hell' which is almost punk-like in it’s simplified intensity.

Scroobius is radical in his raps and indeed is more of a poet, a true poet, than he is a rapper. The man describes beauty in a truly original fashion (at least for pop music) on 'Tommy C', where the most beautiful thing he can think of is Tommy Cooper dying on stage and instead of people crying out in shock they laughed and applauded. In the record’s stunning closing song, 'Waiting For The Beat To Kick In', he brilliantly references a wonderful old Jimmy Stewart film called Harvey. He puts himself in the place of Dizzee Rascal on 'Fixed' to bemoan rapper’s who don’t recognise hip hop as art, rather an excuse to make money, and later on the album he assumes the mantle of a less admirable figure, God, to address humankind in all our failings. Can producer/DJ Dan Le Sac possibly hope to match his gifted friend’s input here? Of course he must and does. A bejewelled producer's hand hovers over every song skilfully controlling each track’s own style, dynamics and counter pointing melodies.

The album’s title track is a superb example of the pair’s chemistry, wherein Pip composes an ambitious and compelling narrative about the different “angles” from which you can view an event. As he winds his way around it, Le Sac shadows him closely with an appreciative arrangement - it really is a great pairing. For all his prodigious lyrical capabilities, Pip’s flow does leave something to be desired, a fact he himself acknowledges on the flow-master Jay-Z sampling’ 'Rapper’s Battle'. This does little to detract from proceedings, however, as Scroobius gets by on charm and content whilst bolstered by Sac’s salubrious concoctions. The duo have accomplished far more than simply showing they've got more up their sleeves than 'Thou Shalt Always Kill' - they’ve ended up making the most remarkable British album so far released this year, in any genre.

Released on 12th May 2008 by Sunday Best Recordings.

Written by Richard Wood.