Crookers – Tons of Friends (Southern Fried)
3/5
By: Hayley Sleigh
It’s a brave move for any up-and-coming act, releasing an album where the majority of songs sound nothing like the track that made them famous: Crookers’ remix of Kid Cudi’s ‘Day N Nite’. There isn’t a great deal of continuity between the twenty songs on Tons of Friends, which is not necessarily a bad thing. On their debut album, Crookers showcase a wide range of musical interests and experiment in (and around) a number of different genres. Besides, the Crookers album I expected - an album crammed full of noisy, frantic tracks of the speed and calibre of Crookers’ earlier remixes (‘Day N Nite’, Rye Rye’s ‘Hardcore Girls’ and The Whip’s ‘Trash’, to name a few) - would have run the risk of ripping my ears off.
About half the tracks on Tons of Friends are dark and dubby electro: among the album’s successes are the epic, haunting ‘We Love Animals’ featuring Soulwax and Mixhell and the softly thrilling ‘No Security’ by Kelis. ‘Remedy’, Crookers’ collaboration with Miike Snow, is a tasty slice of frosty electro pop; one that doesn’t sound wildly different from anything on the latter’s eponymous debut album, just denser and rougher. I also really like the Steed Lord collaboration ‘Transilvania’, which features menacing beats and the kind of super soulful vocals rarely heard in the cold, robot-filled electronic world the Icelandic trio inhabit.
I first listened to Rye Rye nearly two years ago, and at this point in time I’m so desperate for her to hurry up and release a darn album already that I’d happily purchase a single of her reciting names from the phonebook in her thick Baltimore twang, but ‘Hip-Hop Changed’ makes me very optimistic for her not-especially-forthcoming debut album. ‘Hip-Hop Changed’ points to something much rhythmically neater and lyrically smarter than her previous efforts. Not surprising, given that when she and DJ Blaqstarr recorded ‘Shake It To The Ground’ she was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl rapping about being sexy, fly and keeping it real, whereas now she’s a nineteen-year-old woman with a baby daughter and a boyfriend who last year was left paralysed from the waist down by a tragic shooting incident.
Roisin Murphy takes a break from raising her brand new baby girl (for real though, 2009 was a big year for musically innovative, zanily dressed ladies having babies) and releasing elegant, vaguely oedipal-themed house stompers to collaborate with Crookers on two new songs. ‘Hold Up Your Hand’ is a swinging dub track with sultry vocals that recall Murphy’s earlier work as one half of Moloko. Remember the episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks where Mark Lamarr described Murphy’s old band Moloko as ‘stranger than a David Lynch DVD boxset of Bjork’s dreams after a heavy night of mature cheddar and half a gallon of Night Nurse’? Yeah. Totally. ‘Royal T’, Murphy’s far superior collaboration with Crookers, is like Pink’s ‘There You Go’ re-imagined as a filthy, genre-busting tease of a club track. The song is a gloriously impenetrable mess that may or may not be about wanting to steal somebody’s floor, or someone not having to break her arm, or not having to feel somebody’s junk. Can we all stop using the word ‘junk’ as a euphemism for you-know-what in our songs please? It’s ok when Roisin Murphy does it obviously, but then I love her and at this point in her career she is entitled to steal my floor/break my arm if she so wishes.
While we’re on that subject of gross euphemisms, if you can call ‘beat up your backside, dig out the front then murder the phat side’ a euphemism, I’d like to pretend that Crookers’ collaboration with Kardinal Offishall never happened. ‘Put Your Hands on Me’ is wildly unsexy, and the video is stranger than a heavy night bathing in Night Nurse with David Lynch while watching a DVD boxset of mature cheddar and eating Bjork’s dreams. As for Crookers and Will.I.Am’s ‘Let’s Get Beezy’? No thanks. I don’t fancy getting Beezy again anytime soon – this song has given me a dreadful headache.
‘Birthday Bash’, featuring The Very Best, Marina and Dargen Damico, lacks the uplifting sunshiney prettiness of 2008’s mixtape ‘Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit are The Very Best’. Jump Up, Crookers’ collaboration with Major Lazer, Leftside and Supahype, needs more energy and a stronger chorus to take it into Royal T territory, but it’s nothing a decent remix couldn’t fix – perhaps one by Crookers themselves at their most manic. ‘Jump Up’ features one of those maddeningly infectious looped beats that would sound equally at home on a mid-90s Nintendo platform game as it would on the Crookers album I imagined Tons of Friends would be.
Artists in this article: Crookers
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