Was I absent when they announced that applying mid-90s hip-hop dynamics to the resurrection of Manchester's trip-hop ghost was a surefire formula for post-pinnacle glory? Whatever memo found its way into Cypress Hill DJ Muggs' drug drawer must surely deserve the blame for Dust, a technically competent but lacking attempt to expand the producer's repertoire beyond the dusty, wet-smoking rhythmic foundations he laid down on early Cypress albums, using the nu-metal crossover of their 2000 disc, Skull and Bones, as the point of disembarking. You won't hear anything that draws from the gloomy barrio beats of Temples of Doom or Black Sunday, and the dearth of MCs guarantees no lyrical meditations to rival "How Could I Just Kill a Man"; even "Dr. Greenthumb" rises above.
With the exception of Everlast, who contributes his Kentucky moonshiner exhalations to the boring, heart-broken sob-story "Gone for Good", the majority of the vocal contributions here are made by female singers, chanteuses who at all times strain to approximate the performances of trip-hop notables like Beth Gibbons, Björk, Tracey Thorn, and anyone else who sounds impressively sultry, strung out and seductive. That seems to be the order of the day for Muggs; the cranky wall-of-noise "Dead Flowers", the blatant "Angel" ripoff "I Know", and "Tears" are as contrived and forgettable as their titles suggest, and equally interchangeable.
Juxtapose, Muggs' loose collaboration with Tricky, seems to have rubbed off and drifted to the surface, but Muggs can't quite pin it down. So instead, it flies all over the room, shitting everywhere and squawking rabidly, and we're left with some weak Britpop hybrids (with the embarrassingly saccharine "Rain" at the top of the list) and some token snippets of studio tomfoolery, ranging from the almost-clever Laswell IDM of "Shadows" to the, um, almost-clever ambient music of "Niente". I pity the fool who has to clean this up. It's an unrefined, poorly calculated mess.
I know everything reads to the contrary, but I'm not doubting DJ Muggs. Really. You can't fuck with the aforementioned Cypress records; shit, even the Muggs-produced "Babalu Bad Boy" rocked the house harder than anything on Dust ten years prior. Would it help to know that on the CD I'm looking at, it boasts:
No, I'm not doubting DJ Muggs. I'm doubting the quality of a song like "Morta", with its jack-in-the-box flamenco bombast struggling to impersonate Björk's "I Play Dead", which isn't that good to begin with anyway. I'm questioning any excuse you can think of for the trite, nasally "Faded": "We are, we are, we are, we are always faded/ You are, you are, you are the one in my pages..."? What is the excuse for that bullshit? Get this out of my house.
