Review Summary: Itchy & Scratchy Go on a Little Journey
Turntable scratching is still one of the most niche musical embellishments out there, even within the realms of mainstream hip hop it’s generally not all that prevalent any more and once you step outside of that genre you really struggle to find anyone using the technique. A few pop artists have adopted it on occasion, often more as a novelty, and then you have the nu metal artists who flirted most flagrantly with hip hop, notably Linkin Park. For the majority it remains a curio, a borderline archaic musical form that’s forever linked to the early 80’s and artists like Grandmaster Flash. While four piece C-Mon & Kypski certainly have an instrumental hip hop basis to their sound what’s interesting with this act is that they then genre hop wildly beyond that; their sound has a similar eclectic ‘all the fun of the fair’ feel to ‘Since I Left You’ by the Avalanches, just with an emphasis on those turntable skills. If you took the tongue in cheek playfulness of ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ and stretched that across an entire album then you’d be getting even closer to the C&K style; light-hearted, easy going and very Dutch.
2004’s ‘Static Traveller’ was the collective’s second major release and marked a step up in ambition with less of a focus on samples and an increase in the use of live instrumentation; in effect this is the first ‘full band’ effort with bass player Daniel Rose and keyboardist Jori Collignon joining in the song writing process along with turntable virtuosos C-Mon (Simon Akkermans) and Kypski (Thomas Elbers). The result of this change in approach is a collection of songs that pleasingly locate a middle ground between the classic song structures of rock and funk, and the more expansive and unpredictable framework of instrumental hip hop. Most of these compositions build around a core simplicity, throwing a few unexpected curve-balls in there to keep the listener guessing; the choir vocals on ‘Money Money’; the polka section of ‘***ty Bum’; the scat samples in ‘The Evil Needle’.
Those descriptions alone should leave you in no doubt C-Mon & Kypski are playing a lot of this for laughs; ‘Static Traveller’ isn’t an attempt to best ‘Endtroducing’, though it does boast an unexpected and peculiar depth given time. Tellingly the album makes space for some more exotic Eastern flavours on tracks like ‘Dazed & Confused’ and ‘Black Mountain’, and these more restrained and expansive moments afford ‘Static Traveller’ a welcome wide-screen quality that’ll draw you back for repeat spins. In its own offbeat way this album is surprisingly ambitious and if it weren’t for a couple of lulls in inspiration towards the end of the disc this could even have been considered a minor classic of sorts. The band showed even greater ambition on the 2007 follow up 'Where the Wild Things Are', an album that boasted guest singers galore and some straight-ahead rock instrumentation but ended up far more hit and miss in the process, thus proving that they probably got closest to a perfect blend of their styles on this one.
