After years of brandishing sharp, abrasive electronic rhythms in tandem with Godflesh's Justin Broadrick as Techno Animal, Curse Of The Golden Vampire, and Ice, Kevin Martin rebooted this dormant one-off pseudonym as a logical outlet for his outstanding outsider dancehall productions, dripping with distortion and hot like fire. Stripped of the industrialized beats and roared deejay screeds of Pressure, his latest album under the moniker is, on the surface, perhaps in name only.
Nothing on London Zoo matches the sheer ferocity doled out on Martin's releases for Shockout, Klein, Tigerbeat6, and Rephlex, which include a double-disc collection of his Razor X material (in collaboration with The Rootsman) and an EP featuring fresh work with the feisty Warrior Queen bookending retooled versions of previously available tunes. Gone are mixes overdriven into the red and spearheaded by some of the baddest badmen on vocals. Obviously Martin hasn’t abandoned a passion for bassbin abuse, but clearly his appreciation for the austerity of the dubstep scene and a desire for authenticity among Jamaican producers softened his touch, in essence domesticating this once-poisonous insect into one fit to reside in a child’s ant farm.
Or so it would seem. Martin’s songcraft and radical messages remain undeniably intact and evident throughout this suspiciously quieter affair. Toning down the fuzz for London Zoo has not eroded the atmospheric menace of productions like “Warning” nor the ascetic instrumental “Freak Freak,” but rather has the effect of wrapping his bundles of post-millenial tension and anti-establishment angst in natty clothes just a few shades darker than indie pop successes M.I.A. or Santogold. Compared to the recent work from those two, Warrior Queen’s astute politicized verses on album highlights “Insane” and “Poison Dart” trump the former’s glamorized terrorist chic and the latter’s forced faux-hipster irreverence. Only Martin could bring out the bestial best from Spaceape, whose pseudo-intellectual dub poetry work with Kode9 on the decent Memories Of The Future sorely lacks the ardent insurgent soul he exudes here on “Fuckaz.”
While not as dithyrambic as dancehall veteran Daddy Freddy, who made the strongest appearances on Pressure, his peers Tippa Irie and Ricky Ranking show up and show strong some of the youngsters featured on later tracks. “Angry,” an opening salvo that rails against everything from global climate change to the American response to Hurricane Katrina, features a frustrated Tippa over a sparse riddim. Ricky Ranking laments the state of things further on “Murder We,” reminding us all that lines like “war is not the answer” are more than mere platitudes for weekend revolutionaries. Ultimately, so long as it remains a zealous project serving as a means to a noble end, The Bug can never be squashed, not even by a dramatic shift in creative direction.
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