VeeBeeO: Instrumentality
Mental Recordings

Instrumentality, a succinct six-pack from VeeBeeO (Stockholm-born Tim Lundblad), offers head-nodding boom-bap and a whole lot more besides. Lundblad's drummer roots are all over the material with most tracks built from the grooves up and, though the genre is nominally hip-hop, the 12-inch disc's material is closer to broken beat. Tracks like “Cast” and “Klox” lurch and stagger over twitchy guitar funk, while “Fraktur” spices things up with synth sweetener and bass guitar flourishes. The cheeky “December” takes Lundblad's snappy boom-bap for a breezy, fusion-flavoured spin, and brightens the jubilant mood with a sing-song choir of melodicas. Squeezing six tracks into twenty minutes leaves no time for excess or long-windedness and, in truth, some of the pieces sound more like three-minute jams than fully-fledged compositions, but it's hard to quarrel with the aromatic likes of “Byxa” when its skanky groove kicks one so forcefully in the gut.

May 2007