Nightmares On Wax - Thought So…

by Jim Merrett

Not so fast, sunshine!

"Not exactly bursting out but easing into a groove, ‘da Feeling’ is about as worked up as NOW gets. Heading southward, it’s exactly how you’d expect a Med-bound Daft Punk, sloshed on rum cocktails, to sound."

Given the inevitable stop-start nature of the Great British summer, chances are you’ve taken more short haul flights than Gary Glitter this season. Forget the carbon offsetting and get back to how the holiday should be done – on the road. And the road trip is what Nightmares On Wax’s sixth studio album is all about. Balearic, yep, but it’s the journey getting there that counts. And you can virtually plot the points from Folkestone to Ibiza. Via Kingston (Jamaica, not Surrey), maybe?

Not exactly bursting out but easing into a groove, ‘da Feeling’ is about as worked up as NOW gets. Heading southward, it’s exactly how you’d expect a Med-bound Daft Punk, sloshed on rum cocktails, to sound. Laidback in anyone else’s books, for NOW’s George Evelyn it marks a shift of gears. But as we creep down the clear autoroute, we pass some familiar – if now sunsoaked – landscapes at less than frantic speeds.

Recent single ‘195lbs’ is a slab of triphop that rocks its ass as well as its head. Getting more comfortable, the pivotal point of the journey is ‘calling’ – a sub-tropical sunset instrumental that at eight minutes contains more UV rays than we’ve seen all year. Properly loosened up now, you can even excuse the lightweight Fat Freddys Drop-style take on reggae of ‘moretime’ or the Bontempi organ jerk of ‘pretty dark’ – let alone the complete mismanagement of capital letters in song titles.

Warp’s longest serving artist may punish sub-editors intent on fiddling with his bad punctuation, but there’s little else to grumble about. For those suffering SAD – in August! – this might prove the remedy. As dripping with colour as the cover suggests.

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