Now and again you make the unwise decision to ask the guy with the scowl and the merciless way of brushing you aside what the problem is. But rarely do you expect such an eloquent, well-structured and relentless riposte. The ultra esoteric and leftfield hip-hop producer FBC Fabric joins Sarf London social oberservationist, Reindeer for the kind of non-dysfunctional, grammatically correct cultural reform project you’re more likely to glimpse in the pages of the Daily Mail than in the flow of your average rapper – and it’s not only the much sought after ‘Soulsuck’ we’re talking about here as tracks like ‘Passenger’ are as equally confrontational and unyielding. The message isn’t just anti-corporate, it’s anti-commercial, anti-political and anti-heroic. Reindeer tears a hole through the swathes of apathy, voyeurism, pornography and fashion that saturate our culture not with the rhetoric of a preacher but with the sociopathic detachment of a veritable psycho – and it’s a similar deal musically too. The haunting strings, the interminable notes, the portentous melancholy and the relentless saturnine beats provide the fixed, psychotic stare, the minimal ambient passages provide the scary impassiveness and the crunching prog guitars provide that occasional flicker of menace – culminating in the frightfully noirish and cinematic ‘Mask Of Sanity’ and the cello-chomping pompfest, ‘Please Call Stella’. Portishead pursued a similar dystopia on ‘Dummy’ but rarely was even that fine album as queerly unsympathetic and cerebral as this pedantic little beauty.
There’s only three ways of looking at the truth; sometimes it hurts, sometimes you can’t handle it and sometimes it sounds fucking wonderful. The triumph of ‘It’s Not Who You Know, Its Whom You Know’ is that it achieves all three.