With Now This I Have To Hear, Dublin duo, Messiah J & The Expert have delivered an album that fully justifies their braggart handles. A record which runs the gamut of styles and shadings, to describe this simply as hip-hop would be to damn it with faint praise. There are all manner of wondrous aural intoxicants in this bitching brew, soothing jazz segues into synthetic electro splutter, down and dirty beats nestle ingeniously alongside elevated choral interludes and throughout they exhibit street-savvy, lyrical smarts on a par with wordsmith wunderkinds Alex Turner and Mike Skinner.
The opener ‘Domino Effect’ riffs masterfully on chaos theory and culminates with MJEX spreading their wings and unleashing the elemental force of this record: “It was the domino effect that set an album on its way.” Should any doubters persist then they’ll soon be floored by ‘The Boys Have Had Enough’. A rollicking catalogue of audience smackdowns, MJEX exorcise the horrors of live performances gone awry on a track constructed on brutalizing beats and damning put-downs. What particularly impresses with this record is the duo’s effortless ability to switch emotional gears. The poignant depiction of a lonely widower whose life is little more than an empty ritual, ‘VIP’ displays the breadth of their versatility. The jazz-inflected, ‘Something Outta Nothing’ is MJEX’s ideology put to music, invoking, as it does, the artistic holy trinity of conception, imagination and execution. They certainly practice what they preach with the miraculously inventive Now This I Have To Hear, representing the hip-hop equivalent of water into wine. Drink up.