Part of me feels a little bit sorry for Audio Bullys, a duo stuck in a thankless position: they promise great things and can't always deliver. Like a great singer-songwriter with a lousy voice, like a pro-caliber basketball player who's only five feet tall, they're packed full of the right ideas but stuck fighting their own limitations. Actually, that's an outright lie, because they aren't fighting: if their limitations are a wall, it's just another surface they can slouch against, smoking cigarettes.
Their debut single, after all, was called "We Don't Care"-- and if people heard punk in it, it was just that disregard for whether they were doing things right or not. They were. When the song took off in the UK, people suspected they could do many things. They could be the next Basement Jaxx, wrapping house music around a dozen genres-- rock, hip-hop, R&B;, UK garage-- cranking out purified pop from their blender. They could be the next Streets, packing up a street-level vision of Brit boylife and mailing it out on bumping beats. They could christen a new genre-- "hooligan house?"
All of this was just the usual exaggeration from getting very, very excited, but no one was out of line: "We Don't Care" sounds like a couple guys in gorilla suits taking house hostage. It starts with solo vocals, Simon Franks barking marble-mouthed like the Clash; then, before the house stomp comes in-- a big knuckle-dragging bruiser of a stomp, a beat that bounces in a way hardly anything but American hip-hop ever does-- the whole thing stops for the highlight, the barely-intelligible sneer: "WHATHAFAA!" I have notes on this track in front me, and after a bunch of stuff about hooliganism and the jaunty mid-song breakdown I have written: "Oh my god. Oh man."
Ego War sports a few singles this good or arguably better, and in each case it's down to two things: fantastic ideas and consistently great scripting by beat-dresser Tom Dinsdale. His music isn't exactly symphonic, but it's good-looking and inventive: constantly punchy, rough-and-tumble, sneakily switched-up house beats like overexcited puppies tripping over their own legs as they sprint over to lick you silly.
Not to point fingers, but the problems lurk more in Franks's domain: if Americans already have problems with British people doing anything rap-like, Franks's occasional bouts of troglodytic rhyming aren't going to help matters. This doesn't have to kill things any more than punk singers killed punk-- in at least two places, it sort of helps-- but I have to mention the line, "About a year I was with her for/ and when we broke it left me quite sore." It's another reason to feel bad for them, actually, because that clunker comes in a year when UK garage MCs have started looking even better than their hip-hop equivalents-- even Jay-Z's paying attention, and sometime soon, he'll see the release of a full-length from Dizzee Rascal, whose basement rant "I Luv U" walks all over "We Don't Care". As for Franks, well...you're better off if you don't exactly need your pop stars to sound like scholars.
Some winners: the title track, for which my notes go a step further and say "holy god." You could dance to this super-sunny island bounce, but not without sporting a loopy grin at the situation, or at its intense Englishness: it's Madness; it's like the parks of Parklife got paved to put up discos. Or "The Snow": Dinsdale's got a thing for punchy seventies horn sections, and this, their best house track, EQs them through dime-stop switchbacks while Franks lazes around the repeating melody. Or "I Go to Your House", which struts and bumps like Stereo MCs and points the hey-there gun-fingers at you. This is one of those places where Franks's tossed-off babble enhances things: he goes to her house and she's not there, but it sounds like he really thinks that's her loss.
When your M.O. is just a banged-up house pump and a less-than-stellar singer coasting over a few melody lines, anything less than the best has a tendency to grate: like the riff-repetition of the average Fall record, the winners win and the rest just sit there looking underplanned. It's the Day in the Life packaging that fails them more often: on The Streets' Original Pirate Material, Mike Skinner put on just the right two-face-- a garrulous wit one second, he'd go all emo-earnest on you the next, sounding sad, determined, and vulnerable. Franks tries the same, with less success-- on "100 Million" he sits around stoned while his mother yells at him to get a job, and "Way Too Long" offers a Skinnerian tale of bad debts among the geezers, but by "The Things" and "Veteran" he's promising to change his life and "be a better man." In between you get Dinsdale playing with the beats a little: video-game tick-tock and synth-tweakery on "Real Life", then a weirdo Halloween toy-robot bass-bump on "The Tyson Shuffle"; Joe Cocker samples alternate with music-hall piano on "Face in a Cloud".
They don't need to be "great," really, because sometimes it's more important to get everything right; to be honest is often to be honestly great. And they are, In the rough crayon sketches of everything collapsing, of dance music being pop music being dance music again, of anyone singing and rapping the way anyone could shout for punk bands, of everything pumpable or shoutable or loveable collapsing into a hit-single playground. Still, crayon sketches: they're no Basement Jaxx, and it's easy to hope for someone with more professional skills to come fill in the Audio Bullys' blueprints.
