The Herbaliser - Take London

[hev]

Jake and Ollie are at it again. I have an advanced copy sitting in my play list and have been listening to it pretty regularly. Honestly it's probably my least favorite herbaliser album to date, but that still puts it pretty high on my list and a solid album.

If you don't know the herbaliser your missing out on 10 years of break beat gold.

Good write up on Jean Grae and Herbaliser over at okayplayer:
http://www.okayplayer.com/nowhearthis/nhtherb.htm

[f2f]

how much rap is there in the album?

i love their live shows (seen them every time they play in the city i'm in, no rap) but dislike all the 'feat. soandso' in their albums. only pure non-rap album is "Session One", which is still my favourite...

[hev]

Well session one is technically the herbaliser band, so they have the added sound of 12 piece brass section, a hamond, and maybe even some strings. amazing album, but don't hold your breath waiting for the sequel. It won't be repeated.

Take London is about 50/50 featuring emcees like most of the other releases. I'd recomend Something Wicked this way Come if your looking for more stuff like session one. Some really good instrumental vs scratch type stuff on there.

where you at? they don't play stateside too often.

[f2f]

i have 'something wicked' and agree with your evaluation

i'm in calgary but caught herbaliser mostly in saskatoon, where they played the university pub twice between 98 and 00. they've been to calgary too, i believe.

ninja tune have a strong canadian membership -- kid koala is from montreal and amon tobin moved there too recently, so even though the "scene" for that type of music is really bad in this neck of the woods, there's somebody stopping here at least once a year.

amon tobin will be in edmonton on the 23rd of june. i plan on going

edit: herbaliser will play vancouver on the 29th of june, just fyi

[dookeyXXX]

Dug this album out of the crates earlier this week and slipped it into the 5-disc CD player on random.
Tonight I decided to just let the album roll in entirety.
Being a rap guy (I wrote about rap music and hip-hop culture for various rags back in the late '80s and early '90s), I have always appreciated the MCs that Ollie and Jake put on their albums, specifically Ms. Jean Grae.
I think this album strikes a great balance between rap jams and instrumental numbers, plus the guys create some really great beats and grooves for the MCs; their production is heads and tails above most rap producers.

If you want to get technical, there are only 6 "rap" numbers out of the 16 on the album, so that's less than half the album...


I'm not sure if I ever caught them live when I lived in SF, but I interviewed them for a magazine once (will have to dig through the archives to find the piece...)