Ill Manors Reviews

Principal architect of the final transition of the now vast and popular heritage and grime uk garage of the new millennium to a mainstream pop quality. With the unmistakable traits that sublimate matrix british and others who transcend to new heights. For those not familiar: Ben Drew, aka Plan B, born as a singer r & b songs to "sweet-boy Justin Timberlake shit", according to his own definition, but finds his true only in the mid-Zero in ' orbit of the historic crew Roll Deep (Wiley, Dizzee Rascal) with various compilations and a hard hip-hop quite sui generis (Who Needs Actions When You Got Words in 2006), before turning another 180 degrees in the direction of very vintage sound drenched Northern Soul although revisited in a contemporary style both in music and in the themes (an indie-soul might say): the concept album The Defamation Of Strickland Banks (2010), a six-figure success in the UK and beyond. Fixed formula (and reached the general public), another would have played it safe, reinstatement, but not him. He looked over already. For a project of broader compendium of parallel musical journey so far described and its staff cinematic universe, since Drew is also an actor (he has participated in TV series such as "Adulthood" and films like "Harry Brown" with Michael Caine ) and director.

In Ill Manors is all this and more: it is also the album more deep, complex and autobiographical of his young career. Kind of transposition sonic and narrative of the film of the same name, produced by BBC Films and directed by Drew / Plan B, that this writer has not yet been able to see but which critics have described as a cross choral halfway between the crime movie and the social drama, a cross between Shane Meadows ("This Is England") and Tarantino.



Set in the neighborhood of Forest Gate, London, where Drew was born and raised, the album as well as the film tells the story of eight characters struggling in concentric circles, intersecting the same hell. A London more similar to the brink of civil war in summer 2011 that the pax Olympic summer 2012. Nell'infuriare daily drugs, crack and methamphetamine, beatings, prostitution, and amletiche sinister shadows of marginalization by their fathers (ex punk settantasettini hours toxic hopeless, the National Front became gangsta thugs and drug dealers) stretch on children (who give up the school and become part of the baby-gang), personal vendettas and prospects almost non-existent social redemption, apart from one day end up maybe on the front page in the newspaper with his feet forward or bracelets on their wrists, "another posterboy for David Cameron's broken England ". A fresco degraded reflected darkly in the lyrics of Plan B, reporter socio-Darwinian ("I am the Narrator"), gaze at once ruthless and heartfelt, never complacent, corrosive social criticism, but as a company you would like made by men and not only by individuals, in severe moral condemnation (moralist, someone might suggest) of figures and characters that often hip-hop has bathed in a romantic aura and justificatory ("From mice to men, and then to rats / But only a snake behaves like that / But the gang do not care for shooting gaps fool / They're just happy That you fall for the trap "). For comparison with its illustrious (and recent) predecessor: the storytelling of Plan B is the "angry young men" of the late 70/inizio 80, Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg, like the Kinks and The Streets was their nostalgic twilight felix britain. A 'punk attitude that is both a personal matter (the father of Drew played in a punk band called The Warm Jets, around 77, and dropped his family when he was just five months) that a musical question for Plan B, in the he calls a "hip-hop musical for the twenty-first century." A warp with powerful and elegant, and the instrumental parts cut alt rock mix with heterogeneous samples and expertly embedded (you can hear, in the production, the hand of Al Shux, already with Jay Z and Snoop Dog), and Brit-hop singer-songwriter at The Streets, is accompanied by sound soul, reggae, r & b and rap street calls from the other side of the Atlantic (see the ironic paraphrase of "CREAM" by Wu-Tang Clan that opens "I Am The Narrator": " Drugs rule everything around me / Thugs makin 'money / My manor manor's ill yo, yo ill ").




The thickness and cinematic narrative is evident right from the first scene, a "one-two" deadly: the title track and "I'm The Narrator" clever with clips from the movie, choruses anthemici borrowed from hip-hop classic sample captured alive and to great effect in a "hardcore" arcs cutting and pressing of Shostakovich in the first and the spiral plan by Camille Saint-Saens in the second. More or less the same thing that happens in "Drug Dealer", with brass bands around the knotted loop, the rhythm and flow oldschool, the words dub / reggae, another example of richness and originality of writing is "Playing Whith Fire "chanted the angry black 70's Labyrinth (another child prodigy of the grime scene post) that explodes in the chorus, interspersed with a verse characterized by a minimal acoustic picking, a female counterpoint just mentioned and the rappin 'melancholy of Plan B that looks the world through the eyes of a young boy ("He's just a kid / but he feels like the man today / He joined a gang today") which receives its initiation to violence. A pop sensibility also confirmed by "Deepest Shame": the doléance r & b of the singing, the acoustic tour on beat syncopation, while the rhymes tell the story of Michelle, the female lead, the figure almost dostoevskjiana of a young woman who makes life for repay a large debt with a ringleader of the neighborhood ("But there's a millions other girls just like Michelle / Out in the streets with nothing else to sell / To These desperate males other than Themselves, I know / There's no way back from here on out" ). The anger and bitterness that pervades the whole concept is then condensed in the songs more aggressive: "Pity The Plight", with the "punk poet 'John Cooper Clarke (large cult figure in the United Kingdom, the balance between music and literature , who previously collaborated with the likes of Fall, Joe Strummer and more recently the Arctic Monkeys), which opens and closes the piece in reciting spoken word and in the middle of a tour plan, cold, dark, sharp, but especially "Lost My Way, "combat-soul screamed and labored with the text that is a fierce discussion on youth crime and a flow to Public Enemy and" A Great Day For Murder ", punk-rap that seems to come from the soundtrack of" Judgement Night " with London instead of LA Forest Gate and instead of South Central. Complete a work definitely above average: the soul "existential" sung by the Drew in "Live Once," the post grime of "The Runaway" and the open-ended and pessimistic "Falling Down", the suspense of the plan that chimes threatening .