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