Likes swimming against the tide, eh? A bit of a maverick . Likes to shock. Shit. I got it: ‘Shock City Maverick’. So the title could be better. So what? The boy from White Plains, New York and original lynch-pin of the spectacular and experimental beat-boy surrealists, Antipop Consortium and one time paid-up member of the Brooklyn Boom Poetic Collective, Beans is all set to return to the ring with ‘Shock City Maverick’, long-awaited follow-up to Bean’s full-length debut ‘Tomorrow Right Now’ put out by Warp in 2003.
Still progressive and still going against the grain of the standard stash of mainstream rapheads out there in chartland, Beans again successfully merges the knife-edge practicalities of rap with the high-brow peculiarities and extremities of electronica. Cue infantimigasically complex world-play, stuttering, angular beats and all manner of curiously industrial and information-era gasses and chemicals. Of course it all leads on from everything that Beans achieved with the Antipop Consortium, but what did you expect? When you define a manifesto for change as broad and as wide as the Consortium’s there are often a lot of loose ends to tie up – and the frisky, ice-cool intellectualism of tracks like ‘Blind Driver’ and ‘Death By Sophistication’ clearly define an axe with a lot of edge left to grind. But the verbosity and the wordplay is only one side of the coin. Instrumental tracks like ‘You’re Dead, Let’s Disco’ show a flipside with an enviable grasp of the essentials, as clean and as crystal as any flat-screen monitor and as esoteric as any kabbalah. Think Kraftwerk, think Miss Kittin, think a down-sized Aphex Twin. ‘Shock City Maverick’ carries the mantel of many of these and more; always probing, always contentious and always as unwilling to please. The title may be shit and beats could be heavier – but the pulse of a true city needs more than heavy beats. It needs recesses, arches, slip-roads and foot routes. And this is what you get with Beans: roads that lead you even further away from home. A good thing, surely..