Anticon

I'm buying more and more stuff from the nice boys (and girls? Not sure about girls. By the sound of the guys they don't really see many girls and certainly never get to lick any. Some of them have thoe little ginger beards that never really get the ladies' popping) that form part of the Anticon label collective. I first came across them via Themselves' Hat on the Wind that came on a free Wire Tapper cd given away with The Wire Magazine. Most of the tracks fall into a vaguely white, vaguely slacker, vaguely hip hop vein and so far the label hasn't let me down. There's loads of Mp3s at their site and most of them are pretty good though I'd especially recommend buying the albums because most of their best tracks aren't posted. Still, Alias - Eyeclosed is a pretty representative slice of their density, and Theselves - It's Them is okay too if you don't mind the vocals sounding like Melvyn Bragg's mid-american bastard skater son (you know, the one who he pretends doesn't exist but still can't get out of the loop entirely and sends a crap card to at Christmas which quotes Oscar Wilde with a DVD of some Iranian auteur which he got free as part of the Bafta voting package) . Occasionally Anticon's stuff can drift away into almost nothingness (Cloudded take some getting used to and you have to keep telling yourself it is HipHop and not just a recording of a New York Free Poetry and Whistling club night) but the lyrics are normally at least interesting in a Finnegan's Wake kind of way. OddNosdam - Eat/Chew is the final track I'm posting because I think everyone should be encouraged to keep up the mastication.