PopMatters.com (MCT)
The Bug: "London Zoo" (Ninja Tune) (rating: 9)
A long time partner of Godflesh and Jesu's Justin Broadrick (in God, Ice, the Sidewinder, Curse of the Golden Vampire and Techno Animal), Kevin Martin cradled obsessive talents for years under collaborative projects, all secretly his babies, but found in his Bug project a rare calling within dancehall and the raw blueprint for what would one day be called dubstep. The Bug is terminal. It lays off the dub-poetry-laden side of Pressure on London Zoo, but it heightens the zero hour terror of what exactly it means to be (barely) alive in Summer of 2008, the shuffling and volatile heartbeat of history ready to rain down distress from every corner. Martin shines floodlights in those corners, revealing a barefaced volatility as palpable as that found on Dre's "The Chronic" (recorded mere weeks after the LA riots). His Jamaican-by-way-of-England guest MCs splatter "London Zoo's" canvas with blood, vitriol, and plangent dystopianist alarmism. Martin himself scores the mayhem with machine gun jolts, ominous tolling bells, murky sub-bass, and reverberating dystopianist alarm clocks, from the 8-bit bleeper to the seizure-stuttering variety. The Bug is viral. Even though the MCs inked their own diatribes independent of one another for separate sessions, occasionally even in direct discord with one another thematically, the individual tracks still piece together like snap-puzzle components, as if they were each tapping into the same conversation, the same synaptic nerve of the collective unconscious. The Bug is infectious. It's a vision of a world gripped by prepossessed fear and hatred, as if by a "rage" outbreak. It's also packed with full-on soundboy contagions of propulsive beats and lyrical hooks, enjoyable as much as a ghettoblaster that scares the neighborhood children, a paranoid headphone chin-scratcher guaranteed to bring about a case of stoned inertia creeps. _ Timothy Gabriele
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Posted by courier at 11:31 PM. Filed under: Entertainment
