GLC - The Manifesto (?)

[mr.lizard]

Welsh hip-hop is the music you always wanted to hear. Take the smalltown sensibility of a South Coast Welsh town (Newport) and add it to the West Coast gangsta rap ethic: more “bleddy ‘ell” than “bling bling”, it’s the bastard offspring of voice choirs and bloods’n’crips, Plaid Cymru meets P Diddy, with a dash of parochial British toilet humour for good measure. These are high-street homeboys in Hummel tracksuits with a manifesto to make you shit yourself laughing.

Rapidly merging from obscurity like a crotch-grabbing pit-pony, Wales’ collective answer to the Wu Tang Clan has had a meteoric rise, from a hash-fuelled in-joke to sell out gigs in Wales, with barely a few releases to their name. Their early output - passed round on CD-r, MP3 and limited vinyl and built around worshipping at the altar of ‘draw’ - saw this loose collective waxing llyrical (sic) about the virtues of leisurewear, love songs about monkeys, and takeaway delivery driving. And now they announce their manifesto for a new force in UK hip-hop. They’re young gifted and welsh, with a basic grasp of making beats, and a microphone that gets chucked around between their ragtag collection of daftly named Welsh MCs (Adam Hussain and Tim Westcountry feature heavily, as does Mystikal: a rogue English voice that registers somewhere between He-man and Bob Monkhouse).

Although the flow sometimes comes across more like Morris Minor than Mos Def, there’s a lot of ingenuity in the songs themselves. The pastiches dropped deftly into the lyrical dirge work particularly well: as in ‘The Maggot’, “he’s an Englishman in New York” becomes “he’s a money-grabbing bastad from Newport”. “Self-Suicide” is an ode to knocking yourself off to become famous, “Your Mother’s Got Penis” speaks for itself and “You Knows I Loves You” is an hilarious local love-song ("Girl you knows it's true/Like Milly Vanilli/I'll buy you ten fags on a roadtrip to Caerphilly"). Where they really soar, however, is in the ensemble sections – madcap polyphonic sprees with innumerable overdubs of the whole bally lot of them caterwauling – the sound of your community hall being taken over by a coach-load of draw-smoking Welsh gremlins with a fine line in toilet humour. But are they novelty taffies or serious musicomedians with longevity? Only time will tell. Enjoy them for now – you know’s it, spa.