Statik - Presents Grindie Volume 1 (Allstar)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Lordy, this could have been awful. Grindie, you see, is what you get when figurehead of the current, invigorating UK Grime scene Statik gets his hands on some modern day, beloved Indie music, and attempts to blend the two, both in name and in sound. It's got 'potential mess' graffitied all over it. At its patchiest, it sounds like a pesky pirate radio station attempting to hijack the frequency you're currently trying to enjoy the Zane Lowe show on. At its best, it's a showcase for exciting music from two very disparate (but more related that you may have previously thought) areas of our home grown music scene, and a possible eye opener for one on either side of the divide.
The premise is pretty simple - Statik picks his favourite of the most current crop of exciting guitar bands, harnesses their melodies but dirties up their beats (The Kaiser Chiefs' 'Everyday I Love You Less And Less' for example getting treated to a 'F**k Drums Remix') and rapidly spits out rhymes using the new creation as a backdrop. Over sixty four tracks, none lasting much over the half a minute mark, it even manages to point out things about some of your favourite songs that you might not have noticed before - for example, that Ladyfuzz's 'Bouncy Ball' has a hell of a lot more potential for filth than anything those scuzzy Babyshambles have ever managed, and that in this context, it's even more difficult to try and refrain from dancing to Franz Ferdinand.
It'd be a gimmick if it weren't for the impression you get that Statik genuinely favours these records, seeing himself as some kind of bridge builder between the two camps (the amount of grime here is not to be overlooked - if anything, given the structure it provides, it takes precendence). So it's an entirely serious enterprise even if it's still mighty sloppy in places - but given that it was meant to represent a sort of mix tape (how many of you still make those? Can we trade?), that was probably entirely the desired effect.
What you should take away from it, apart from hopefully a new found admiration for certain styles that might not previously have been your bag, is the new found knowledge that dissimilar forms of music have more in common with each other than you may at first have thought - after all, everything's a sound, isn't it? 'Grindie Vol. 1' utilises all kinds of noise to great effect. It's exciting, it's fresh... it's a complete bloody shambles. But since when has that stopped us loving anything?
Artists in this article: Statik
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