Fuzzy, agitated, intensely frustrating, curiously funky and as restless as a bishop in a brothel. And if you can add anything to that I’ll gladly dip my dick in a salad dressing of your choice.
Australian art-come-tennis-come-music fanatic Chris Colonna was fortuitous to say the least when he swindled a student exchange trip to Brooklyn’s renowned Pratt Institute in from his mentors at Canberra School Of Art in 2001. Afterall, a free ticket to your spiritual home is rare and rarer still if you’re some daft, gangling youth with little or no prior experience with a microphone. But patience, persistence and a chameleon like propensity to soak up one’s environment have seen BumbleBeez81 squeeze out one of the last few years’ most unlikely punk-rap hybrids.
With kid sister Pia co-handling activities on the mic and busting self-reflexive rhymes on everything and nothing, Bumblebeez81 concoct some bravely experimental rap flows indeed. ‘Rappa’ and ‘Pink Fairy Floss’ may ape the scratchy Brooklyn vocal antics of wee girl rappers like Missy Eliot and Kelis but they’re underpinned by beats and buzzes that wouldn’t sound out of place on Berlin´s Shitkatapult label or the UK’s flagrantly waspish Warp Records. Not that it’s all beeps and buzzes. Tracks like ‘Come Ova’ come on like some crazy, screwed up monster collaboration between Parliament, Bootsy Collins and Frank Black.
Trailer parks, 4-tracks, dirty kitchen sinks and scruffy, baggy trousers – The Printz is everything that is ragged, raw and belligerently cut n’ paste. Part punk, part rap, part rock, part beat, it’s album that’s likely to provide a clearer definition of the eclectic than an afternoon spent rifling through Brian Eno’s record collection.
It’s improvisational, tangential and unseemly, but as tracks like ‘I Come With Water’ and ‘Microphone Diseases’ demonstrate there’s a catchy deliberate madness to it all.