Hip-hop class is now in session. Hands up who remembers seminal UK hip-hop label Kold Sweat. Good. You’ll all remember the label’s top act Katch 22 then? Excellent. Now, a slightly harder one this time. Who can tell me the name of the bespectacled front man of Katch 22?
Huntkillbury Finn, or HKB Finn as he’s now known, is a bit of a legend in the grand scheme of UK hip-hop. However, his debut solo LP, Vitalistics, doesn’t see this veteran of the often frustratingly stifled UK hip-hop scene resting on his laurels one little bit.
The fourteen tracks on Vitalistics encompass almost every mood imaginable, and contain such a variety of styles and methods of production that this is no run-of-the-mill hip-hop album.
The first single, Motion Fitness, finds Finn rapping almost in slow motion, but his stylish Jamaican swagger and rhythm are never lost. The result is a melodic and hypnotic example of hip-hop’s unrivalled ability to remain fresh and original.
Each of the LP’s four sides take on the name of a season, and the tracks within each ‘season’ bear a clever resemblance to its general mood. The three tracks inhabiting the Winter side, for example, are dark and eerie enough that they would provide the perfect soundtrack to a stroll round a deserted, post-nuclear-disaster Chernobyl city centre.
Y? is one of the most energetic hip-hop tracks I’ve heard in a long time. Finn angrily chants ‘fuck your job - hang your promotion’ before spitting vitriolic rhyme after rhyme, while a trumpet wails beautifully in the background. Who thought they didn’t make them like that any more?
HKB Finn is a hip-hop artist, but Vitalistics boasts the sort of creativity and willingness to push musical boundaries that HKB Finn qualifies as being more than just a hip-hop artist.
So, class, now that your homework’s right up to date, what are you doing sitting there? Should you not be at your local record shop by now? Class dismissed.
www.sonrecords.com
Reviewed
by Fraser Syme
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