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Scroobius Pip- Distraction Pieces
Written by Richmond - Hunter
Last month Scroobius Pip released his first solo album since 2006. For those of you who don’t know, and judging by his record sales that’s a lot of you, Scroobius Pip is a white spoken-word poet/ rapper from Essex. His name comes from an Edward Lear nonsense poem, implying that he is something indescribable, something new. Sadly Scroobius Pip hasn’t always lived up to this title. He has spent a lot of his last two albums lamenting the current state of British hip-hop, which is all well and good if he actually adds something new to the table. His album ‘Angles’, with producer Dan Le Sac, was indeed rather remarkable, but often slipped from poignancy into pretension, failing to be quite the work of genius that it had intended to be. Some stand out tracks are ‘Magician’s Assistant’, a painfully honest song about suicide and ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’, a fun techno pop dance song with the fantastic opener ‘ Every now and then I cower and I need to find empowerment/ Empowerment is paramount to how I can begin to mount/ A plan that I can implement/ To make a dent on ignorance’. Following ‘Angles’, Scroobius Pip and Dan Le Sac’s next album, ‘Logic of Chance’ was a sour disappointment. The album featured the inexplicable track ‘Get Better’, a painfully awful song aimed towards helping the youth of Britain. What was surely intended to be an honest dialogue about the problems facing today’s younger generations quickly turns into a patronising public service announcement with such wonderful moments of insight as ‘I ain’t saying’ be celibate,
Go out and have your fun,/ But there’s plenty you can do without impregnation,’. Anything punk or somewhat revolutionary that had existed in Scroobius Pip before quickly vanished for good, or at least so I thought but now Scroobius Pip has released ‘Distraction Pieces’. It is a wonderful, refreshing return to form from Pip and has something he has never really managed to muster before: anger. This album seethes with Pip’s venom, his anger and frustration pour out over the 9 tracks. Finally Pip seems to have moved from looking out (preaching his beliefs from a position of unwarranted superiority) to looking in. It is a short album, but one definitely worth buying, I was delighted to hear Scrobius Pip finally inject some of his own emotion and pain into his lyrics and delivery.
The album starts with its best track, the sublime ‘Introdiction’. The opening line sets the tone for the rest of the album, ‘I saw a dead fish on the pavement and thought “What did you expect?, there’s no water ’round here stupid, should have stayed where it was wet”‘. It’s a silly, disarming opener with strangely haunting undertones of anarchic nihilism and death, mostly due to Pip’s irate delivery. We then learn that this album is comprised of ‘all the shit that flies around my head and keeps me sleepless’. The drums are provided by Travis Barker, provide a furious rock and roll feel to the song which pervades the entire album. The song is a surreal exploration of Pip’s own frustrations in writing, his own inability produce anything original or of any worth, ‘nothing’s original, now I’m repeating what I say’. Writer’s block and a lack of creativity is a tired subject for writers and lyricists but Pip does manage to make it fresh, parlty with his use of humour (‘you see a mousetrap, I see free cheese and a fucking challenged’) and by connecting to the topic to his more general feelings of alienation (‘some people where I live don’t like me and I fucking know it’). It’s a powerful opener and not something the rest of the album quite manages to live up to, not that it doesn’t have a good go.
The second song, ‘Let Em Come’ is the testament of a struggling artist. In it Pip describes his desire to suffer with integrity rather than to become a commercial success. ‘See we choose to cruise a route that ain’t paved with gold/ So our shoes don’t slip they stick and grip this road/Our tools are ink slicks that we engrave and mould/ For an end goal you maybe can’t spend or fold’. Again, its a nice angry song about alienation which manages to avoid the pitfalls of pretension which Pip has so easily fallen in before. These first two songs really stand out to me, but that’s not to say the rest of the album is bad. ‘Try Dying’ is a perfectly good song about the cheery topic of embracing one’s own mortality, nothing particularly profound is stumbled upon but it is catchy and has some good lines. ‘Domestic Silence’ is a painful song of loneliness and alienation (noticing a trend?), my main gripe with he song is the wordy, polluted and somewhat stupid chorus. ‘Death of the Jounralist’ is a fantastic attack on the laziness of modern journalism in he internet era. This is followed by the fun yet venomous ‘Soldier Boy’, an angry torrent against the British military which samples Soulja Boy’s ‘Crank That’. ‘Soldier boy now kill ’em, kill those Disney villains’, Pip screams over the chorus. ‘The Struggle’ is a surreal song, one part Pip’s inner turmoil and one part serial killer confession (‘my name is Johnny Depp and I kill people’ the first verse ends). It is packed with evocative and powerful imagery (my public portait’s immaculate but there’s blood on the easel’) and will definitely have you listening for more. The next song ‘Broken Promises’ manages to be succinct and profound with its very simply message of ‘is a lie really a lie if you meant it at the time?’. It is not the most complex of ideas but it certainly resonates. The album ends a slightly low point, ‘Feel it’ featuring Natasha Fox, it is a somewhat dreary song about love and sex and something and something else, it drones on slightly too long and doesn’t quite have the power that it seems to think it does. With all being said, I would definitely recommend this album to anyone interested in rap, beat poetry, rock, punk or anger…