Staccato bursts of sampled guitar spit from your speakers, soon joined by less organic FX that resemble nothing more than dodgy sci-fi laser guns. The beats are as insistent as an itch that you just can’t reach, with big, fat and funky basslines complementing the general air of madness. And this is just the first (and title) track. Welcome to the world of RJD2, Definitive Jux’s über-producer, who has justifiably been compared to DJ Shadow for his skill at cutting and pasting the most unlikely of musical bedfellows and making them sound like they were born for each other.
RJD2 works entirely in samples, but his compositions generally feel like a genuine band affair. Although, if this was a real band, it’d be the most schizophrenic, genre-hopping collective ever committed to compact disc. RJD2’s brain seems to be brimming over with so many ideas that he often throws four or five of them into the same song.
‘To All Of You’, for example, starts off all super-smooth, old-skool soul, with the most liquid bassline outside a Sade record, before morphing into a scratchy, jazzy, classic hip-hop standard. ‘Exotic Talk’s blend of heavy guitar riff-o-rama and deep funk sounds like prog rock for the new millennium, while ‘Ring Finger’s big meaty riffs give way to flamenco guitar-picking which bizarrely doesn’t sound out of place. Then there’s ‘Iced Lightning’, a hybrid of hammy synth overload and mid-paced, brooding melancholia and the warm and fuzzy soul of ‘One Day’.
My personal favourite, ‘1976’ isn’t a paean to the rawk histrionics of The Zep’s halcyon days: rather this is a homage to the 1976 of Motown, Stax, disco and Studio 54. It’s brassy, soulful and funky in equal measure and at under two and half minutes, is blissfully brief, prompting this listener to hit the repeat button again and again.
Since We Last Spoke is the sound of a master mixer throwing away the rule-book and having some serious fun with a melting pot of musical styles and genres. Highly impressive.