The 2kDozen 500: #264 - Trim, "Chelsea Smile"

Dark paranoid business. You can smell the weed a long way off, some evil hydroponics. The production is just as murky and homegrown. It's grime, but not as I know it: some injections of other bits and pieces, a bit of UK Garage on "Circle 1" (which also has a sample from Little Fluffy Clouds) and a bit of Autotune wobble and Garage Band strings on "Nothing Like Me Pt.2". I'd never heard of the lad until Frankie "Hip Hop Thursday" Boyle bigged him up on Twitter. Definitely worth a listen.

It opens with "The Fence" that has sparse beats with massive handclaps backing up the tale of him deciding to do music when he was in prison. "F64" inches about in short sentences, dark mutter. Menace in the swollen bass of "Dead In This Ting", backing up the angry vocals about murder and that. "I'm just rhyming/Passing the time/It's too easy/I'm trying to master my mind" he says with a chuckle in his throat.

"Lights Out" is approaching a sing song. The sound is so scary, that the title "Facing My Demons" is worrying; but it is one of less nightmarish tunes. There are thrills and skills aplenty. "L D N" (produced with real gritty swagger by Balistiq) is one of the stand-outs, slapping down "other MCs" over some sadistic bass and shuffling ninja drums and electric guitar, letting better know that he will rip off any gun metal grey BMW he comes across. It's maybe the nearest to full-blooded hip hop on the album. It should probably the theme for the Olympics - if the opening ceremony was a reworking of The Omen. "I'm everything dark/I'm always last of all."

I need to make sure I keep an ear out for his album proper. "Some are screaming King/But who crowned you?/I'm screaming Sith/From Mount Doom."

Rating: Murky out of Homegrown