Angles

From Jim Morrison’s shamanistic twitterings to Nick Cave’s New Testament-cribbed doomsaying, the shared history of rock music and poetry is freighted with moments of unintentional hilarity. Clearly none of this was pointed out to Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, the UK duo who lit up dancefloors last year with a double whammy of verse-heavy stompers: ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’ and ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’. Featuring tattoo-splashed beatnik Scroobius Pip’s spit-flecked musings on the true nature of love and the dangers of hero worship, these tracks provide the template for the rest of the pair’s long play debut: laptop maven Le Sac conjures clipped, burbling beats, over which Pip delivers poetry-slam flows that seethe with earnest outrage. Sometimes, it is true, Pip’s dreadlocked philosophising creeps you out a little – ‘Look For The Woman’, a would-be paean to feminine beauty, finds a way to be both pervy and mawkish.
For the most part, though, his glottal wordplay sits comfortably within Le Pip’s rumbling death-disco – on ‘Rappers’ Battle’ Pip sounds like a book-bingeing younger sibling of The Streets’ Mike Skinner; the distortion-heavy ‘Fixed’ suggests something Nine Inch Nails might drop after a crash course in comparative literary studies. None of the new material truly stands toe to toe with ‘Thou Shalt...’ and ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’– those songs transmit a propulsive intent elsewhere absent from Angles – but, having struck upon a golden formula, the duo show they have the chops to flog it for everything it is worth.

Key Track: ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’