Necessary Measures
Pest seem to have collected less of the Ninja Tune groupie aficionados that are usually associated with the label. Who knows why. Something to do with the fickle finger of fate and fortune, not having favoured their faces. They’ve done the exposure time (regular giggers as spynaworkshop), done the research – most of them are involved in some sort of classical instrumentalisationalism (African drum studies??), and they’re as diverse and broad-ranging as any pretentious music-lover could possibly want. But just because you know what music is doesn’t mean you have the talent for writing it.
Pest have created an album with a funky, chirpy mood through a load of estraned samples (I swear I heard E.T. in there somewhere) that scrolls through a list of their favourites – a few of which seem to include hip-hop, jazz, soul and big-beat, picks a few at random and throws them into a mixing pot. It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t always work. ‘Dr. Umz’, for example, is a bit of an unfortunate blend of UK garage with some samples from what could be the Pink Panther in another life. On the other hand, there are some gems here: ‘Heard Yer Bird Moved In’ is just about indefinable, and is cool enough to get any gathering’s groove going, and ‘St. Pest’ is a luvverly chilled track that, for a change, doesn’t want to send you straight to sleep. The singles, ‘Chicken Spit’ (the opening track), ‘Jefferson Shuffle’ and ‘Slap on Tap’ sum up the album quite well, also featuring the schizophrenic nature of the other songs on the album.
Ultimately though, Necessary Measures is like having someone in control of a magic radio that has many, many, many genres playing at once (it obviously has to be magic as this doesn’t happen in reality) and not being able to decide what sort of music they actually want to listen to. It starts off well enough, with good ideas and some strong mixes, yet it seems to go a bit stale towards the end.
They’ve labeled themselves as ‘What Mr Scruff might be doing if he were split into five evil clones and fed bad acid for month’, and I guess that’s true – it just might help if everyone listening to it had gone through the same kind of wacky month as they had so we’d know what the fuck kind of language they’re speaking.
6.0
MD 06/08/2003