Oddly, the fact that I don’t understand the words (they’re in French) draws my attention to the vocals more than usual; most foreign-language music I’ve listened to does the opposite. Doiron is still sad, pretty, bleary, glossless.

Very Anticon-style hip-hop without the defensiveness. Their (his?) rhymes are the opposite of tight — not sprawling or sloppy, but carefully wandering everywhere, going for variety in vowel and consonant instead of, uh, consonance. Double-tracked vocals (and occasional female backing!) make it surprisingly pally. Pretty good.

I was just thinking the other day that I wanted more Roni Size, but didn’t know about this. If it weren’t one of those records that unattractively prints the credits on the back cover, I’d have left it in the clearance bin. The generic name and art hide a record with more personality than the two Roni Size/Reprazent albums, thanks to Leonie Laws’ vocals: creepy, which I guess is mandatory for drum’n'bass pop crossovers, but not raspy on the one hand nor haunting on the other.

Compared to their later, longer album, this sounds like the demo mode for an automatic Mindless Self Indulgence song-generator. The changes are a little forced, and, silly as it is to complain about music like this being too harsh, it is. I think they may have learned to work the keyboards better before the major-label release too. Still good.

Pretty generic for Mush (though hey, the squib on the back now reads HARM CITY MADE CLASSIC NEXT LEVEL HIP-HOP instead of AMERICAN MADE wugga wugga). Professor Max Mineblo’s backing tracks are low-key but interesting, only Labtekwon, who seems to like talking more than he likes words, doesn’t go anywhere with it.

At first I thought all the guest rappers were deeply lame, but maybe they’re just very, very good at backing off and letting the X-Ecutioners run the song. Though I retain suspicions, the scratching is very hot, and all the better for being mostly in context. Also, if one gets tired of listening to the music, a certain amount of amusement is available just by looking at the part on the back where it says “14. Genius Of Love 2002 (featuring Tom Tom Club and Biz Markie)”.

Picked one of these up at the record store today… Lego’s attempt to replicate the success of Pokemon is totally cute — imagine buying your Pokemon at IKEA and building them by hand. Despite the awkwardly “cyber” brand name, though, the names and mythology for the rest of the line singlemindedly hammer on the consonantal and conceptual themes of TV’s Survivor. The little guy I bought, Nuju, is apparently one of the ‘Turaga’ (stumpy, harmless village elders); the others are Vakama, Onewa, Matau, Whenua and Nokama. There are two other corresponding cohorts of six figures each (and six hometowns) that can use any of the hundred or so magical masks available. I haven’t worked out whether some of the masks have ‘tribal’ names or if they’re all things like Nuju’s Noble Mask Of Telekinesis.

Embarrassingly, only one of six Turaga is female, and her Toa (hero) is the only female warrior. Looking for more information on the subject, I instead discovered that the cute, affordable characters are all Good; their enemies are larger, more expensive, and harder to assemble. I might drop another $9 to have a girl Toa guarding my keyboard, but I don’t need $100 motorized robot crabs for her to fend off.

The remaster sounds good, though I’m not sure the recording has that many hidden depths to restore. Misleadingly, two songs are tagged as b-sides on the back that were actually on the existing American version of the album, while “Blacks/Radio” (previously removed by the US record company) is not. Even with the proper running order I don’t think this is quite as good as Talk Talk Talk.

Fortunately the big sticker reading “Fully Restored Original Artwork” (and blocking several square inches of same) is the kind that comes off gunklessly.

It’s been a long time since a record made time seem to slow down. Normally the mark of a dull record is how much time passes without me paying attention to it. I can’t believe that, in a world without ’stop’ buttons, this record would continue boring me for ten full minutes more. A shame.

The Mitchell Froom/Tchad Blake production which motivated me to buy this is as good as expected, but the pinhead vocals are so earnest and awful that I wonder if the band wouldn’t be more faithfully portrayed by a record that I would unreservedly hate. Occasionally drifts into Squeeze/Costello territory, where it’s even less believable but sort of okay.