How can you take a hip-hop album seriously when the
first track claims ‘Get up stand up for your dairy
products / Get up stand up for your daily yoghurt’?
Quite simply in the case of the Meteorites, as their
first album, Dub The Mighty Dragon demonstrates
an extremely humoristic take on hip-hop and ragga cultures,
not only through the band’s quirky lyrics, but
also through their interpretation of music and their
obvious ignorance of boundaries.
Max Turner and Marcus Rossknecht have been making incursions
into the underground music scenes of Europe for a while,
but it is only now that they finally team up to present
one hell of a funky and playful electronic hip-hop record.
Tired of the over-seriousness of the electronic movement
as a whole, both Turner and Rossknecht, who currently
officiate from Barcelona, create with Dub The Mighty
Dragon a mixture of torrid dancehall-themed electronica
and offbeat rhyming. The opening track, Milkman,
sets the tone for what is a rather original album by
setting the ragga-inspired beats firmly in the context
of the Meteorites music. Based on Rossknecht’s
strong beat structures and minimal melodies on which
Turner wraps his apparently naïve and humoristic
lyrics, the pair’s compositions invite the listener
to get up and move, while entertaining the mind at the
same time. Dub The Mighty Dragon can sound
an incongruous and somewhat out-of-place piece of work,
but it actually turns out to have far more depth that
could be expected. Apparently depicting everyday life
as seen through purple lenses, Turner actually digs
far deeper into life’s mishaps, exposing our society’s
obsessions with wealth, health and youth and twisting
them again and again to finally make them appear utterly
irrelevant. Tracks such as Milkman, Dracula,
Meteorite or NumberOne demonstrate
the characteristic take adopted by the duo. Their music
also extent the scope of electronica by dropping the
formulaic structures heard on most records these days.
Their approach could at time reminds of the work of
Boop Bip, Board
Of Canada or some of the Anticon crew, but Dub
The Mighty Dragon is also an extremely unique piece
of work.
With their oblique take on music and irreverent genre
bending activities, Meteorites are certainly meant to
make themselves heard loud and clear. Dub The Mighty
Dragon will have you succumb to the pair’s
infectious beats and uncanny lyrics and have you on
the dancefloor in not time.
3.8/5 |
