Herbaliser : Something Wicked This Way Comes

Herbaliser demands your attention...

Maybe The Herbaliser should get a camel in on vocals. Or record their next album

on the moon. Anything, in fact, to make the world beyond Gilles Peterson sit up

and take notice, for ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’, their fourth album, is

too good to be quietly filed away in, that dullest of genres, jazz-beatz.

Featuring, among others, rappers Blade and Phi-Life Cypher and Homelife’s

otherworldly diva Seaming To, ‘Something…’ bristles with energy. There are

tough, commanding rare grooves, fly spy-thriller tracks, big, daft hip-hop

tunes, a brilliant lounge-reggae skank, ‘Good Girl Gone Bad’, and, in ‘The

Turnaround’, and the ‘Apache’-like b-boy break-out, ‘Battle Of Bongo Hill’, two

of the funkiest, party starters you’ll hear all year. You can understand why The Herbaliser are

cast as perennial [I]”festival favourites”[/I], but they deserve better than such faint praise.

Tony Naylor

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