Something Wicked This Way Comes

It seems as though The Herbaliser are doomed to forever inhabit the lower reaches of hip-hop’s second division (The Buckfast League, in case you didn’t know). If the criminally underrated mini-masterpiece Very Mercenary failed to afford them any sort of wider recognition, it’s unlikely that Something Wicked – in many ways the less-beloved sibling – will do the job for the Twickenham technicians either.

Certainly there’s a few inklings of the old magic on cuts like ‘Battle Of Bongo Hill’ – think blaxploitation incidental meets a mutation of that ever-adaptable Apache break – or the cheeky, swaggering MC turn from Wildflower on ‘Good Girl Gone Bad’, but such moments are few and far between.

Elsewhere, there’s a return to the sort of musically accomplished but downright dull jazz ‘n’ breaks workouts that they wisely avoided on Very Mercenary. The bookends of Something Wicked form its best moments – the downtempo Morcheeba-meets-Carmen overture of the title track and the beefy, lush funk of closer ‘Unsungsong’ make it just about worth the asking price.

A pleasant disappointment, nothing more.