Nobody Beats The Drum -
Beats Work
If you’ve been fortunate enough to see Nobody Beats The Drum perform in the past, you’ll expect Beats Work to be an all scratching, break mashing, body rocking extravaganza. And you’d be right. Beats Work is irresistible. Even if you were in a straitjacket you’d snap your neck to the beats on this album. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of a NBTD show yet, just check the footage from their Noorderslag performance at the bottom of this page to see how mental the crowd goes. When you’ve got tunes like Quit Your Job, which combines the mantra ‘quit your job and get back to bed’ with pulsating bass and killer synth lines, all you can do is surrender your body to the rhythm. But Beats Work is far more than just an album that you can dance your socks off to. Just like the group’s name, it works on so many levels.
It’s that rarest of beasts – a breaks, or even a ‘dance’, album that works as well in the club as it does on your iPod. But it feels wrong to shove it into any category, especially that lamest of denominations, dance music. Yes, Beats Work will make you dance. However its scope is much larger. It embraces breaks, electro, hip hop, rock, rave, even classical music. You could claim that the level of improvisation and the syncopated rhythms belie a jazz influence, and I wouldn’t laugh at you. The way that most tracks centre on a central sample or break, then go on to chop it up til it’s almost unrecognisable and back again, gives the album the feel of a particularly dirty electronic version of a jam session. But enough of that. The point is that this is far from brainless dance music. It’s been created with enough care, humour and imagination to fill five Fatboy Slim albums, and then some.
Take Damage. It starts with a simple (in the context of the album) beat and a distorted guitar riff, before an old-school rave piano meanders in, then a typically catchy vocal sample, aided and abetted by ridiculously funky beats and scratching. Just as you’re coming to terms with this aural assault, it’s time for a sax solo to take it another level. And all this in the first two minutes of the track.
It’s fan fucking tastic.
The last time a trio this inventive featured robots on the cover of a record was ten years ago when the Beastie Boys dropped Intergalactic. They might work in different genres, but aside from their mutual love of dressing up onstage and wicked sense of humour, by incorporating anything and everything into their sound both groups mash up the genre they’re nominally associated with to create something new and invigorating to get your rocks off to.
If you can catch Nobody Beats The Drum live, do. They’ve got a DJ, VJ and KeyJ (which is the best title ever) and their combination of killer tunes and visuals will blow you away. But if you can’t, you’ve got the sizeable consolation of Beats Work to enjoy in the comfort of your own home. Just turn it up as loud as you can.
Beats Work is available from a good record shop near you from today, the 29th of February.
For more details, and to see their brilliant comic biography, peep www.nobodybeatsthedrum.com