Think of Limp Bizkit. Now take away the whining self-pity of ‘My Way or the Highway’, the unconvincing bravado of ‘Rollin’, and you have El Jefe – altogether more chilled, more thoughtful yet equally passionate purveyors of grunge-hop.
‘Amorphous Phormula’, their debut album on Zip Records, is a rattlebag of beat poetry, hip-hop/grunge crossover, reggae beats and mariachi-infused horn playing that combines to create an album of muscular beauty – with tough guy vocals that aspire to something more substantial than the usual rap posturing El Jefe give us a taste of what the Bizkits might possibly sound like if they ever grow up.
‘Phormula’ kicks off with ‘Intro’, a rough patchwork of static and sampled vocals threaded through with Darren Reid’s seductively lazy horn playing before tumbling into ‘Elements’. On the face of it, this track is a conventional no-one-can-touch-us rap boast, although less obnoxious and more in earnest than average. ‘Half Self Half Expression’ uses skeletal (yet gracefully understated) guitar to underpin a song about choice and positivity – imagine Mike Patton rapping to the Chilli Peppers ‘Under the Bridge’ and you come close. The tracks that follow have deep, staccato vocals rolling over atmospheric guitars and other assorted effects that contain strong echoes of Faith No More at their most majestic.
The album is punctuated by spoken vocal segments plus ‘Intermission’ (an instrumental featuring Heath Walton on sax), and slowly works itself into a slow crescendo climaxing in ‘Nature’s Signs’, where the guitars are unleashed and fight it out with spaghetti western horn solos.
‘MushroomBeat’ a dense meditation on hallucinogenics contains some engagingly surreal images:
I’m all loose drank too much of the cactus juice now I’m deep in the sand with marbles pouring out my ears and my hands have earthworm fingers.
And ‘Molasses’ eases us to the end of the album where an instrumental segment plays out with the by now familiar combination of funky beats and reverberating trumpet.
El Jefe have opened for the likes of KRS-One and De La Soul and should be carving out their own little niche – something dark yet welcoming. They produce hip-hop tracks that sound like camp fire songs from the industrial outskirts of a city – songs about dusk, friendship, modern life and MCing. And maybe their natural habitat is the outer reaches of the charts. Who knows? Wherever they are, they’re making some good music.