HIEROGLYPHICS - Over Time - 2007 - Album review

HIEROGLYPHICS – Over Time – 2007 – Album review
HIGHLIGHTS: You Never Knew/ Masterminds/ Phoney Phranchise/ It’s about Time/ If You Must/ Cyberpunks
SOUNDBITE: “I was dazed and confused, now I’m amazed and amused”
RATING: 5/5
Planning an invasion? Send out a scouting party! This collection of B-sides, rarities and remixes appears to be the vanguard of the upcoming Hiero onslaught (there are two new LPs by Del the Funky Homosapien and another by Souls of Mischief on the horizon) sent to check out the lie of the land and measure the collaboration potential of the hip-hop buying public. And if this is the scouting party, people won’t so much collaborate as offer the summer’s big Hiero Imperium arrivals open arms, the best houses and their pick of the womenfolk. Normally such a compilation appears when fat, sweaty record execs gleefully realise that an artists’ musical cast-offs have achieved critical mass - i.e. when the artists themselves have rejected enough tracks as substandard to constitute an LP. Bung on one or two tracks that are actually half decent as a sweetener and en masse fans can be relied upon to go for said item like a moaning zombie horde for a shopping mall. However, when this happens the moaning isn’t the vacant sigh of animated corpses but the sound of the sentient record-buying public unable to articulate its frustration at getting burnt again. But not this time homes! Hiero run their own shit and as the hardest working collective in hip-hop their labours have borne exceptionally sweet fruit which means it’s tricky trying to find a duff track or even a half-assed one here. It’s hard to see why any of these have become rare let alone why any of them were ever B sides. In short - it’s fucking flames. The bottom heavy Hiero signature sound is omnipresent and lyrically the tracks included explore themes of industry greed, paranoia and rivalry occasionally alternating and sometimes coinciding with selected excerpts from the outermost limits of Del’s weird consciousness. Of all of the Hiero artists he is the most represented here with six cuts out of fourteen. It’s interesting how Del’s nuts lyrics and idea of fat loops and beats is surpassed by Del’s nuts lyrics and Domino’s idea of fat loops and beats on a massive version of Phoney Phrancise consisting of chopped up guitar cuts and bass stabs over a full old school break. Then there’s Dan the Automator’s remix of Del’s If You Must where the original’s synths are replaced by a rolling break and a typically low-key yet schizophrenic Automator stew of samples including what sounds like a choral harmony from a 1950s western soundtrack, mariachi horns and a kid’s nursery rhyme. Domino’s production is again shown to good effect on his remix of opener You Never Knew which employs a minimal muted rhythm guitar as a solid platform for Hiero to reveal “It’s not a wrong thing to be addicted to a microphone like a heroin fiend.” Whatever you say boys! Del and Tajai’s Masterminds is an edgy slice of future funk, Souls of Mischief’s Soundscience gets a subtle makeover and we end up with more of Del’s weird sci-fi shit on the giant Cyberpunk. And that hasn’t even begun to do the LP justice. Like I said. Flames. Especially if you like Del. Out now.
Listen to Hieroglyphics - Over Time