Smiling at Strangers (Review)

Watching TZU performing live at the Manning Bar at Sydney University in August, with  MCs Joelistics’, Yeroc’s and Seed’s stints on borrowed electric guitar, bass and keyboards introducing a quasi ‘rock star’ dimension to proceedings, meant this, the second album by this often crazed Melbourne-based hip hop quartet,  came as less of a surprise than it might have. Produced by Regurgitator and Butterfingers knob-twiddler Magoo, it proves that it’s not just 1200 Techniques who can successfully combine rock and hip hop, even if one senses that TZU are making this shift less for commercial reasons than through a desire to experiment with and stretch the often restrictive parameters of MCing and Djing.  As Joelistics raps in the opening track Hey OK, over a guitar riff reminiscent of the  Led Zeppelin sampleused by Schooly D in Signifyin’ Rapper, and to John Lennon-like rock-out vocals reminiscent of Helter Skelter, ‘every song is like deja-vu’, which is decidely not the case on this album. The second track, the group’s current single release, She Gets Up, is even more of a rocker, with a funk-driven brass and soul vocal refrain, and there are few signs of the political and social  concerns of TZU’s first album, Position Correction. Logical uses sung vocal distortions and a driving bass to keep the dance-dominated  rhythms going in an attack on a pundit ‘more critical than Kerry O’Brien on a good day’ , and it’s not until track 4, Recoil, that the political harangue kicks in, but it does so with a vengeance. A full-frontal assault directed at John Howard, the ‘conservative curse that covers this land’, and the government’s sycophantic support for US foreign policy, it is interspersed with a mournful ant-war choral refrain which eventually takes centre stage. TZU Blues has more of a funk-driven, juke joint impulse, with a short burst of blues harmonica,  and a hollering vocal which evokes the Mississippi delta, and Won’t Get Played, a 4am in the morning stream of consciousness to a driving drum-dominated  rock beat,  seems to strike a cautionary note about radio airplay, but turns into an antagonistic address to a cooler-than-thou, coquettish female. The keyboard-driven Coming Round is a quieter reflection on the weight of the working week, raving all night and coming down after, with an insistent pop chorus. In Front of Me again evokes the Beatles in its vocal chorus, and is again addressed to a girl, Back to Front steals its brass riff from Spinning Wheel and is basically an invitation to everybody in the house to dance - ‘Move to the skin of the drums’. There is some virtuosic vocal scatching from Paso Bionic, whose solo instrumental album Beats for a Lonely Rapper made ripples in the national hip hop scene  earlier this year. Reminisce is a slower, more reflective and melodic piece in the form of an entreaty to a loved one with brass and orchestral embellishments, Lounge has a Debussy-like clarinet loop running over a throbbingly  insistent ostinato bass reminiscent of Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English and lyrics that seem to relate more to couch potatoes and the blind leading the blind  -’ it makes headlines in the six o’clock news and we all know the words to the new pop tunes’ - than the musical genre. Raise ‘Em Up is a country music-style rant about a trip up the East Coast of Australia with ruminations on the country’s future, with Strawberry Fields-like flute samples, and the slower final track Unnecessarily Blue, which also comes with an extra re-mixed and weirdly downbeat electronica version featuring Paso Bionic’s production skills, has so much vocal distortion and special guitar effects it is almost unintelligible, and is one of the less successful cuts on the album.

Smiling At Strangers is bound to stir up local hip hop purists - as Joelistics states in the press release, ’somewhere along the way hip hop became a tired corporate beast that ran to a formula and trotted out the same lame cliches. Kind of like the cheerleader for capitalism. … TZU have always flown by the seat of our pants. With this album we wanted to push ourselves to do something different … from the local scene and the international scene. We challenged ourselves to write an album where we played all the instruments and wrote songs that were equally influenced by Muddy Waters and A Tribe Called Quest. A lot of inspiration for the songs comes from the concept of “What would it sound like if the Beatles made hip-hop? What if Ray Charles was taken to a jam with DJ Krush and the Kinks. What would that sound like?’

The result is sometimes rough but always adventurous, if lyrically not as cutting edge as TZU’s best work, and whether its more rock orientation will lead to the kind of crossover success enjoyed by 1200 Techniques will probably depend on how Mushroom markets it. What remains consistent is TZU’s characteristically wild, crazed and often exhilaratingly imaginative approach to hip hop that is more aligned with Paso Bionic’s other crew, the avant-garde lunatics Curse ov Dialect.