Beans Tomorrow Right Now

MC Beans emerges from the wreckage of leftfield hip hop luminaries Anti-Pop Consortium unbowed, undimmed and unhinged, brandishing Tomorrow Right Now, his debut solo outing brought to you courtesy of the Warp label. Fourteen tracks which make like fourteen steps on route to sonic dementia. A strange trip then, alternating between old skool rhyming and phuturistic beats, often perverse, sometimes enjoyable, and all too frequently damn irritating.

Lyrically Beans deluges with the verbiage, a white lightening syntax blur. Certainly not to everyone's taste, and he packs a greater punch when occasionally shooting for the simplicity i.e. Slow Broken which hits hard like the brilliant Cannibal Ox; "Slow broken/smash your mouth/slow broken", he chants with real menace. As the wise man said, less is sometimes more, and yes, you can try too hard to be clever.

Other highlights include, Toast, scattershot rap over ambient beats evoking the dull orange glow of the street sadness. Hot Venom, starry disco beats, and Kraftwerk bleeps, shining metallic in the good time sun. And em... well erm... that's kind of it I'm afraid, the rest being a jumble of jolting influences which hit wide of the mark. Pointless, un-innovative, pain in the arse techno dirges like Rose Periwinkle Plum (catchy that) and Sickle Cell Hysteria (that too). Human beat box messing (Crave), bizarre duets (Mearle), and faintly nauseating noise terrorism (Raping Silence). All of which prevent a real talent from achieving his full potential, another victim to the free reign of experimentalism.

A shame, because at his best Beans is a heavyweight biographer of the urban struggle, telling it real, shearing it of the bling bling. "Fuck your MC being/DJ Jigga Jigga", he raps on spoken word piece, Booga Sugar (a don't do drugs cry out). And none are more righteous, or strike such a verisimilitude; "Make music for MC's to slit their throat by", he lays down on opener, Roar, and at that stage you are inclined to believe him. Sadly, these gifts are way laid, bogged down by eclecticism employed to its fullest effect, denying us a modern day street beat manifesto.

Tomorrow Right Now, full 'o beans, not all of them magical.