Like the single "Battle Flag", Lo-Fidelity Allstars triggers off a schockwave that will wake you up from the radio coma caused by an OD of Offspring, Sugar Ray & other Huntington Beach clones.

While all these rap-punk bands haven't gone much further than Rage Against The Machine, all of them cut from the same cloth where it is impossible to discern them from each other, the UK invades once again. I have to say that to find some musical innovation, It is not towards the "United Copycats of America" that we should look to, but instead towards the UK, cradle of pop, techno, punk, new wave, alternative.. . Lo-Fidelity Allstars encroaches upon Tricky et Portishead's trip-hop, but instead of delivering an auto-depressive boredom, they spread a sonic panic.

The album heats up with the scratch-sample warning of "Warming up" the brain farm. Then Kool Roc Bass and his groovy bass fusiones The Prodigy and Happy Mondays, succeeding where The Prodigy 's dj album The Dirtchamber Sessions failed. Follow tracks successfully mixing drum & bass, rap, techno, alternative, trip hop, funk with a robotic Shaun Ryderish voice, whose height is the venomous Battle Flag, combining the best from Prodigy and Rage Against the Machine. In between, there are some mellow songs, troglodytic and wobbly ballads. Among them, the hypnotic How to operate with a blown mind with his bass bathed in waves of keyboards reminescent of Depeche Mode's "Walking in my Shoes" and "Nightime Story" closing the album in a Portishead style lament (a voice adding "I had no idea it was going to end in such a tragedy").

This album shows that musical barriers are made to be crashed.

  Ed Dantes

     Lo-Fidelity Allstars: Don't Be Afraid Of Love


     Backstage Passes
     Make Beats
     Custom Socks