Label
Visionary Underground
- Name-checking East London, and with a title like ‘Keep the Grime On’, you could be forgiven for thinking Visionary Underground’s debut album is yet another new entrant to the Grime scene currently growing too big for its own self-proclaimed underground status.
But while the album shares a certain dark, frenetic energy with the Grime genre, it owes more to breakbeat, dub and Asian influences. The result is an engaging, sometimes confusing mish-mash of styles which tends to the fast and furious, with the occasional foray into slower, hip-hop driven territory. ‘Champagne and Wealth’ is such a track, mixing dirty basslines with rap lyrics just on the wrong side of uninventive: “Life, it ain’t about the champagne and wealth, it’s all about knowing who you are to be yourself”. The better tracks eschew the simplistic rhymes in favour of a tight, layered sound comprised of looped tabala melodies, industrial sounding glitches and fractured beats.
Another track, ‘Mind Yourself’ continues the trend of knowing lyricism but fares better in moving into specifically politicized territory – something of an urban rallying cry. Indeed Dr Das of Asian Dub Foundation is a collaborator on the album and his influence is evident, as is that of MC Navigator of the Freestylers.
At 15 tracks the album is on the long side, and after a while the beats tend to sound repetitive. But this is an accomplished debut from a trio who succeed in fusing a welter of influences – kind of ‘East meets the East End’.