This is a long-form interview-cum-essay about the rapper Lil B, for fans and newcomers alike. In an ideal scenario you might mark this to read later on your smartphone, or if you're feeling less cutting edge you could perhaps print it off and staple it together. Enjoy.
“Ellen DeGeneres! Swag! Ellen DeGeneres! Woo!” Flanked by a brick wall of security muscle, a snake-hipped Californian, little more than 5'7'', is whipping the crowd into a froth of flailing arms and pumping fists, blue light glinting off his gold teeth and shades as he announces himself humbly as the 'BasedGod'. It can only be hip hop's most divisive figure for a generation: Brandon McCartney, or as you probably know him, Lil B.
After hovering on the fringes of the big time for a few years, Django Django finally made a splash in January with their magical eponymous debut, securing hours of radio play with the enigmatic effervescence of single 'Default', which they despatch with confidence early on tonight.
The XOYO punters tessellate and squirm in the oversold venue, eager to get an earful of this 'hot new band', as if DD hadn't been playing London's toilets and trend-holes on a near-weekly basis since 2009. To be fair, this is version 2.0 – tighter, stronger, and most definitely weirder, or at least truer to their own odd-kid-out nature. They did meet at a Scottish art college, after all.
Singer and guitarist Vinny Neff is the pretty face centre stage, contributing shards of Link Wray twang and surf guitar and clacking his coconuts vigorously (the percussion instrument, that is – the third pair of the tour after having them stolen each night). Bassist Jimmy Dixon does his best turkey neck while keeping close harmony, Dave Maclean (whose big brother is in The Beta Band, fittingly) takes on the not-so-simple task of keeping time, and the gorgeously named Tommy Grace does everything else required on synths.
Sweating through their uniform Django t-shirts, they finish with the ecstatic nonsense of 'WOR', soaking up the adoration with genuine surprise at their new-found status as critical darlings and commercial contenders. They won't be seeing a venue this small again.
The best shows are most often those where artist and audience fall into a frenzied feedback loop of mutual appreciation, ecstatic vibes and perverse egging-on to go louder, harder, funner. Of the many qualities attributable to Glasgow producer and prodigy-turned-scene-stalwart Hudson Mohawke, that ability to tap into exactly what the crowd wants – or needs – is perhaps his most natural talent.
Faced with a sold out venue of pumped up Londoners defying the too-cool-to-dance stereotype, he plays it wide, filling the stage with giant letters spelling H-U-D-M-O and wisely breaking up the cascading technicolour onslaught of his own material with snippets of anything from Pusha T and dirty South hip hop to Bjork's crystalline yelps and a final coda of Tweet's 'Oops (Oh My)'. Tracks from this summer's Satin Panthers EP more than hold their own against Kanye and Jeezy though, with all hands raised for the horn splatter and glass shatter of 'Thunder Bay' and the sizzurped wobble of 'Cbat'. Happy hardcore rubs up against low-slung crunk and the ratatat percussion loved by HudMo's peers, but the effect is always one of all-consuming PARTY rather than unfocused eclecticism. Bottle this and flog it as a legal high for school nights.
'Tropical pop' is a neat – if kind of crude – tag for those sun-drenched songs built on rippling textures, polyphonic rhythms and 'primitive' percussion (as if played by whooping loin-clothed islanders, maybe – told you it was crude). But over on the shady side of the island, where the vegetation lies in damp tangles rarely brushed by the equatorial sun, a cooler, dreamier kind of 'tropical pop' germinates.
Visions of Trees add a dose of minor-chord industrialism to this darker side of trop-pop, like the twisted steel of a burnt-out propellor plane rusting in the jungle. Without labouring the metaphor any further, the duo carve a downbeat niche from Joni's mournful beats and Sara's R&B-inflected vocals, like the sadface rave of The Knife or Crystal Castles.
Annoyingly, all that ethereal dreaminess falls pancake-flat on stage at XOYO, with the untreated vocals too plain and too high in the mix to chime with the lazy Liz Fraser comparison I'd heard. While the beats are interesting enough, if nowhere near ground-breaking, the show would be more captivating if VoT fucked with the good-girl vocals. There's no denying the potential, but maybe they can't visualise the wood for the – nah, I won't say it...
