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A Magazine for Sheffield

FATHEAD

Fathead, the new 11-track Herrotics album released on Blah Records, sees Prospects Napalm, Ordell Duke and AGN successfully venturing into new territory whilst showing a continual evolution of their pre-existing, hyper dense hip hop sound. The group’s ever-present anti-establishment ethos is pummelled into listeners’ ears on a wave of harsh industrial percussion and abnormal samples, which give the lyrics an adequately strange surface from which to attack your brain.

The deranged funk of tracks ‘Soge’ and ‘Doze’ sail close enough to the known wind to sate any hip hop fan, whilst off-kilter production on ‘Dumb’ and ‘Sup’ may confuse dweeby traditionalists into crying out in dismay, “But these guys used to be dope”.

Fathead’s standout track, ‘Rab (Random Angry Bloke)’, with its circular electrical currents and drunken robotic drums, is the kind of song that would make my freshly potty-trained nephew shit himself with glee whilst dancing around his mother's baffled feet with a rusk and a screw face.

Blunt Mancunian accents, growled verses and mutilated soul loops form the body of the piece, all of which might not be the modern scenester’s cup of peppermint camomile, but some people also listen to Balearic whisper disco instead of dark, smack-coated jazz from New York. As with such jazz, the listener should not try to rationalise what is happening when listening to Herrotics, but rather let the chaos wash over them, as anyone attempting to understand this wild referencing might have better chance of deciphering the Voynich manuscript.