This album came out in 1997, right at the peak of the popularity of the DJ Shadow style of ominous instrumental hip hop. Although I'm pretty sure Coldcut had been doing his thing for a long time already, it's hard not to hear the influence of "Endtroducing" on this. A lot of dark basslines, sampled drums with rolls, and a little too much of the late-1990s obsession with filling instrumental tracks with spoken-word snippets from instructional and sound-system-setup albums. I wish I'd come across this album at the time it came out, or within the next couple years at least, because this sort of stony hip-hop meld is exactly up the teenaged Vortex Ranger's alley. It outdoes Shadow's opus in quite a few ways, including its polyrhythms, synth lines and general flow of quite a few of the tracks. I doubt it could make the claim "Endtroducing" made of being made entirely of sampled sound, but twelve years on who really gives a shit? This is actually a lot trippier and scarier. Next time you smoke a fat one and go for a drive through abandoned streets in the rain, throw it on and see if you don't agree.
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