In the early days of grime, say around 2002 or 2003, it was easy for Americans (many of us still using dial-up to snag single MP3 transmissions from the London underground) to feel like we'd never be able to keep up. Almost a decade later, it still feels impossible, but for entirely different reasons: Whether we're talking about freestyles caught on cell phones in clubs or fully thought-out mixtapes, the brand-newest shit from grime's young turks and old hands is now instantly accessible. Much like the current state of U.S. rap, grime unleashes an avalanche of semi-underground material every month, and you can catch a headache just thinking about trying to process everything.
No one represents the promise and perils of this state of affairs better than Wiley, still one of the genre's most distinct voices and crucial producers. Up until 2006, you could listen to the entire recorded output of this grime godfather, from bedroom beat experiments to charting singles that reshaped UK urban music, in just a couple of hours. Now it's arguable that even Wiley can't remember every track he's released in the past half-decade. In 2007, he put out no less than six "best-of" mixtapes, and he hasn't slowed down since. If anything, since his brief brush with the UK mainstream in 2008 thanks to the pop-dance undeniablility of "Wearing My Rolex", he's sped up, as if his thwarted dalliance with a major label allowed him to see the futility of releasing one "official" album every few years in a cloud-based world. But Evolve, available through the auspices of real-deal label Big Dada, is clearly being marketed as one of the Wiley releases you should pay closer attention to.
And you should. Gone are the sickly sweet R&B choruses from his last LP, Chill Out Zone, a sometimes gorgeous but mostly misguided foray into grime-goes-quiet-storm. From opener "Welcome to Zion", we're clearly in old-school Wiley World, as defined by the chilly synth tones and hand-drum-and-computer-clonk rhythms of his earliest singles like "Igloo" and "Eskimo", albeit with a fresh-for-2012 production upgrade. It's no surprise to learn he's hooked up on a few tracks with Mark Pritchard from Africa Hitech, whose best music similarly brings together twisted quotes from the history of rave and manic polyrhythms that feel conscious of Afro-Cuban tradition and post-human at the same time. In the early days, no other producer had Wiley's strange feel for lurch-and-stagger funk, for a shouldn't-work-but-does kind of syncopation, and it's nice to know he hasn't abandoned his bizarre way with beats in favor of comfortably waist-winding grooves.
Wiley hasn't totally given up on crossover success, and Evolve is no way an hour-long return to pirate-radio mic-busting brutalism. But even the cuts aimed at dancers rather than freestyle trainspotters have a pleasingly off-kilter feel that owes more to the wilder side of dancehall and its endless global mutations. "Boom Blast" is an obvious stab at the party-rocking electro that's everywhere in mainstream pop these days, but with wilder drums and a more menacing vibe. Its resemblance to "Like a G6" merely points out how stark that chart-topper was, rather than how pop Wiley can go. He sounds revitalized as a rapper, too. Gone are the mushy-soft love rhymes from Chill Out, blessedly replaced on many of Evolve's deep cuts with the reams of breathless and bracing East London slang and hard-won introspection that once marked him a potential UK Nas rather than a fleet cockney Ja Rule. When he does indulge in mere playa braggadocio, there's often a wicked and knowing silliness to help the boasts go down, and the wildstyle bass manipulations on tunes like "Link Up" and "I'm Skanking" once again shout, "I'm a badman," as loudly as the rhymes. Plus his sense of humor remains as twisted and idiosyncratic as ever. Perhaps only Wiley would concoct a minimalist, almost gothic instrumental and then turn it into a skit about how hard it can be to catch a cab.
It would be a shame if you do overlook Evolve out of fatigue, since its one of his best, a mostly single-minded return to the on-the-mic fierceness and computers-go-tribal rhythms that first made his name. But it would be totally understandable. In 2010, he threw 11 .zip files of new beats onto an unsuspecting internet. I can barely remember a single thing about that particular data dump, except a feeling of amazement slowly giving way to exhaustion. In 2011, he put out not only three mixtapes, but two of those as official albums, at least one of which was another semi-classic almost lost in his manic flow. And not one to let more than six months go by without a new transmission from the Eskibeat bunker, he's already back with his eighth available-in-stores full-length in a little less than eight years. This one's a keeper, though, and if you've tuned out on grime over the last few years, either from negligence or overload, here's an easy way to reenter grime's current moment, even if Wiley will likely declare it old news in a couple weeks.
