Bleep

Dalek have always been the avant-garde hip hop band most likely to succeed and this excellent album is testament to that fact. They haven't lost sight of their wide-eyed, experimental take on the genre that has it's foundations firmly rooted on the fact that successful hip hop needs to have strong rhymes and beats, just like reggae needs its' drums and bass. They eschew inaccessible weirdness for weirdness' sake.

This is an incredible album and one of the best so far this year. They've taken out some of the noise of previous releases and concentrated on strange and deep atmospheres, building walls of My Bloody Valentine-like guitar and string swirl. This has then been combined with the kind of stressed out instrumentation that Boards of Canada are known for, the paranoid urgency of Mobb Deep, the matter-of-fact lyrics of Cannibal Ox and a tough-minded political stand-point. The big sub-bass swoops that characterised their earlier works are still present but the mood is almost raga-like, dark and meditative, and all the better for it. Top quality.