It might have been four years in the making but the cool, cult karma-ranger and stand-up philosopher, Lewis Parker follows up 1998’s Melankolic’s release, Masquerades and Silhouettes EP with a Jedi-powered punch of a record.
Light-sabre aloft and with a teeth-a-grinding Parker delivers his own gritty, idiosyncratic take on the world at large. Taking us on a tour of the British capital, with name checks of everything from Mr Kipling, Microsoft Windows to McDonalds, Parker squares up to all da big issues – dealing particularly cruel blows to the ‘dirty world of profit’ and double dealing ‘espionage’- without losing so much as a hand or his ‘gal’ in the process.
That Parker uses the fat commercial grosser that is the Star Wars franchise as philosophical vehicle is a conundrum in itself – but it’s a paradox that seems to work: beneath the gross expanse of merchandise and marketing ‘espionage’ is a probing Jedi spirit – both of the thing and in the thing.
Based upon a lush sample seam of cult cinema, the East London rapper dishes up a rich cast of cooing vocal samples, falsetto backdrops and chill and trancey strings. From the suave ounge of ‘Intro To The Sky’ and Communications’ to the woozy jazzuality of single ‘Incognito’ and the bile and battle cry of ‘Sun’, ‘It’s All Happening Now’ runs a broad, disparate blade-edge of cultural-materialist rap.
Deep, sexy, groovy and funked-up – just how it should be.