Contender for the end of year favourites.
When you have one of the best songs of the year, how do you follow it up in the next year? You release an album like this!
Yes, Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip may have caught the ears a few times in 2007 but theres no doubt that ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’ was a standout track for many listeners and ‘Angles’ houses this song and eleven others and it just about lives up to the expectations placed upon it.
One of the best things about the band is that at times you are never sure if it is totally genuine or if perhaps there is a spoof or parody going on here. The flow of the music and the clever lyrics could easily crop up in a Chris Morris show and it is perhaps a surprise that the album doesn’t feature ‘Uzi Lover’ or ‘Me Oh Myra.’
With the lyrical flow coming at you with great pace, there is scope for education as well as fun and it has to be said that there is a lot to take from the words on this record. ‘Development’ has a good breakdown of the elements table and it is delivered in a manner that is slightly educational but is placed in a light and unforced manner. Scroobius Pip has a lot of talent and his rhymes and couplets are an immense part of why the act is hugely likeable.
At times he is very funny, the track ‘Tommy C’ starts off very earnestly and makes a very good point about brainless pop acts tossing out the words beauty and beautiful far too often but then proves this point by saying that “beauty is more than just a nice pair of tits” and he is right. The song then goes to onto tell all about Tommy Cooper, which is not a topic that has came up too often in many songs of late. There is a genuine point to the song and Mr. Pip conjures up an image of beauty that is hard to better and certainly knocks the words of Aguilera warbling about what is beautiful.
‘Letter From God To Man’ benefits from a lovely Radiohead sample that is suitably mashed up at various points and serves as another excellent song that puts the blame from God to man for the bad things in life, which again, is fair enough.
So there is no doubt that ‘Angles’ is an album of lyrical genius that repeated listens will have you coming back week after week but without the backing music, it would be a spoken word album of much less interest. This is an album that has an infectious flow that will have any listener jerking and moving in time to the beats and bleeps throughout
This is an excellent album; it combines charm and wit with a spirited and tremendous music backing and doesn’t easily fit in with any genre apart from their own. All hail to Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip and if Mr. Pip has a few spare hours, he should get himself on a few governmental commissions and start putting his excellent take on life to good use. And by releasing the album this year, Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip have ensured that ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’ will be one of the top songs of 2008 as well!