Hood Joplin - Hazard

The spacey blip blorp synth opening of this Hood Jones catches me immediately. Then the kick starts. I’ll linger on this track for a bit. It has fringes of L.I.E.S compression style audio and it makes me quite happy. This release from Hood Joplin is near hot from the presses. Kinda.

Described as ghettotech, rife with juke and footwork roots, splashes and trunks. Catching this on Bandcamp has been a good thing.

The every way talented artist & DJ hails from Edmonton Canada, and grew up steeped in music and rap as this entertaining interview on Smoothie Tunes will tell you better than my pretending to have researched it and cobbling their stuff out in “just enuff so no ones notices yus”

Wrapped about the twitching kick there’s ripples of sort of old school sort of timeless vocals that touch rave and drum’n’bass making it as easy to chill to as to bop with.

‘Course it quickly slips that to jungle footwork territories. Within the new there is a familiarity to the tracks, that dips across juke and drum’n’bass and hip hop and that certainly helps them along.

There’s something about Hood Joplin that really reminds of DJ Rap.

That’s not a bad thing either.

Music for stoned dancing. Or being chill, yet angry at the same time.

Hood’s kicks are real solid and are one of the reasons I keep playing this release.

‘U’ is a track close to my heart, its experimental old noise swell and bubble right before the “You don’t know who that is” vocal cheers me up whenever I hear it. This is a close runner as track of the release for me and the whittled out kick running like a fluttering heartbeat helps that.

It’s a party disc, that can be played from start to finish without fucking with the vibe, at the same time, it’ll do your various days and tell you a story.

I’m sure I’ll come back to it as a track, but ‘Tar’ is the least of this release for me. I’m not in the mood for the soft Vangelis-lite synths that are popping up a lot recently, but that’s on me. The production is tight and it reminds me of UK drum’n’bass like Goldie, earlier Grooverider, and Bukem and the likes, and I’m sure Asura is out there saying something to the screen but my memory is shot, it reminds though, it reminds. Just not for me, right now. I am totally bored with cinematic-y drum’n’bass.

Besides that one thing, this is a quality release and very much worth your time and money. I’ve found myself forgetting to play other new things, and running through this a few times on repeat. Good for thinking and travelling.

Here’s a juke & Big Beat-ish track Hood Joplin released in 2016.