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On their debut album 'Angles', Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip have created a genre-hopping ode to contemporary culture. It’s a record that references current British grime luminaries and a notoriously tight comedian who dropped dead in front of millions of viewers in 1984, along with others bands and solo artists who have made their mark on musical history. The Essex duo have created a challenging and relatively engaging set that includes their first chart-breaking single ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill.’ Unfortunately, 'Angles' offers little more than that single’s plucky beats and the trademark colloquial rhyming street rhetoric of Scroobius Pip.
From the dark balladry and thought-bubble beats of ‘Look For The Woman’ to the blinding electro that pulses through the very soul of the album’s title track, 'Angles' shows the importance of eclectics in hip-hop. That said, this is one hip-hop debut that works hard to push through a plethora of ideas that often, become garbled in the crafty mix of music and lyrics.
Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of the album is that 'Angles' doesn’t have songs waffling on about carving out a grim existence against a perennially grey backdrop. Instead, Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip play to their strengths by telling it how it is whilst remaining wholly inoffensive.
‘Development’ fiddles comfortably with acoustic guitar, meandering slightly while twitchy, feverish rhythms course through the songs’ very veins. Such interplay between the background sounds laid down by Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip’s waxing-lyrical is what makes the album work – but only just.
For every moment of experimental fun like that heard on half piss-take, half vitriolic tirade ‘Tommy C’ or the frenetic mash-up ‘Rapper’s Battle’, songs such as the Dizzee Rascal-esque ‘Fixed’ and ‘Back From Hell’ struggle to make a name for themselves.
In some ways, 'Angles' bridges a gap between The Streets brand of hip-hop and the neon slashing grime of Dizzee Rascal while sitting on a pedestal that’s entirely their own. Still, the album’s standout tracks (‘Look For The Woman’ and ‘Angles’) seem to fall short of the chart-breaking efforts of their contemporaries we’ve heard in recent times. It feels as though the duo had fun making a DIY-style record in the back of a car on the mean streets of Essex. Yet, whether the album will have the longevity of say Original Pirate Material for example, is another story.
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