MISSY ELLIOTT
THE COOKBOOK (GOLDMIND/ATLANTIC)
3/5
IF the sharp, anarchic productions that Missy Elliott and her studio partner Tim "Timbaland" Mosely threw out in the mid-to-late 1990s seemed to offer hip hop a third way in the wake of the internecine east and west coast feuds that resulted in the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious BIG, the southern style concocted in their Virginia studios now rules the world.
Elliott and Timbaland, along with fellow Virginians The Neptunes and Georgian acts Outkast and Li'l Jon have had a massive impact not just on hip hop but R&B and full-on pop. All make hip hop icons such as Eminem and his mumbling, snaggle-toothed cronies look like anachronisms.
But The Cookbook - it comes complete with a sleeve which tortuously over-eggs the metaphor of the album as meal, the credits as perfect recipe - fails to expand on the revolutions brought about by Elliott's previous albums. For inventiveness, relentless catchiness and sheer, inspired lunacy there's nothing here to match songs such as Get Ur Freak On, which still, four years after it first appeared, is the definitive version of Elliott and Timbaland. Maybe it's because only two tracks - Party Time and Joy - are produced by Timbaland, though the fact that the best production on The Cookbook comes from others (notably Missy Elliott herself, and The Neptunes) suggests not.
Party Time is a boisterous, syncopated blast, which begins with a sample from Whammer Jammer by The J Geils Band; Elliott puts her sharp tongue to use in taking down (in no particular order) most other rappers, "guys [who] think they're more important than the superbowl", Coolio's hair and prissy R&B novelty Sisqo. "I kick down doors and I rock many shows/ I put a tag on your toe and call you John Doe/ Missy be the name and M E is my initials/ Don't forget about it like the world forgot about Sisqo." That's before she slips into a cod-Jamaican accent for the final verse, and says she'll slay all comers.
Irresistible Delicious has Elliott and veteran gangster prototype Slick Rick trading barbs over a shuffling beat and horn stabs lifted from Slick Rick's own Lick The Balls (maybe Elliott decided that sampling one of Rick's other hits, Treat Her Like A Prostitute, was a step too far). In it, Elliott slips into a hilarious approximation of Slick Rick's English accent (he grew up in Wimbledon, before moving to the Bronx, age 13).
The best tracks are Lose Control and On & On. Despite the presence of the bellowing, gravel-throated Fatman Scoop, the former is a thrilling, futuristic bump, an ascending, disorientating synth line providing spine-tingling, otherworldly contrast to the booming, bowel-excavating bass. That both are lifted wholesale from one of the first techno records ever made - Cybotron's peerless, untouchable Clear, released way back in 1982 - makes the track no less great. Elliott, always in search of the perfect hook, hasn't borrowed so liberally from someone else since 1997's The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).
On & On, meanwhile, is something hip hop aficionados have been waiting some time for: a collaboration between Elliott and The Neptunes. It's been worth the wait: squiggling submarine pings, a bassline that grinds and saws through your speakers, booming, crackling percussion and Elliott in bruising, rasping vocal form.
"Missy be the name . . ." it starts, the phrase scratched and chopped up until, almost imperceptibly, you hear her groan, as if frustrated at being prevented from having her say. "Let me grasp the microphone and I'm gon' take it away" she says eventually, after a shimmying tribute to Ol' Dirty Bastard. "Every time I spit I blow one or two speakers/ I'm a top model diva but my name not Eva, " she raps, "Yeah I bring fever rocking classic Adidas/ I'm straight off the heater, rippin' needles off the meter." Nothing else on The Cookbook matches these two moments. My Struggles, with contributions from Mary J Blige and rapper Grand Puba, tries hard but never quite gets there, though Elliott's rapping over slouching, souful beats almost makes up for the rather tired backing. We Run This is based on the oldest of old hip hop staples, Apache (though using the Sugarhill cover, rather than the endlessly-sampled Incredible Bongo Band workout everyone else has plundered in the past 20 years). It never reaches clich's escape velocity.
Can't Stop is a wired, funky grind, all distorted, choppy percussion and urgent, fuzzy melody, and sounds like one of Basement Jaxx's pop savant moments fed through a grinder. All of which is good, but not enough to make a great album. Missy Elliott is one of the most influential hip hop figures of the last decade. Like her male contemporaries, she often runs the risk of believing her own hype - which has always been every rapper's prerogative and blind spot - and it's testament to what she's done in the past that an album which reaches higher than most other hip hop releases still feels, well, a little undercooked.
FIVE KEY MISSY TRACKS TO DOWNLOAD
Hit Em Wit Da Hee (1997)
From Elliott's debut album, Supa Dupa Fly, this moody, spartan collaboration with Li'l Kim is hip hop at its most elemental, with Timbaland's production stripping down everything to a jumpy bass drum, shuffling percussion and a mean, spiky bassline. Missy and Kim, lay out their scheme to take over the world, in between demanding to be told where the party's at.
Hot Boyz (1999)
Da Real World was a distillation of Supa Dupa Fly's grooves, more bare than its predecessor. Hot Boyz takes the usual sexual politics of hip hop and reverses them; Missy's the one in control here, no matter what car the bigshot boys drive.
Get Ur Freak On (2001)
The moment where Elliott and Timbaland eclipsed all who stood ahead of them in hip hop, and the base ingredient for 1000 bootlegs. A vital, jittery slice of manic dancefloor mayhem. "Hush your mouth, this sound is when I spit it out, " she raps.
"Holler! Ain't no stoppin' me/ Copywritten, so don't copy me / Y'all do it sloppily/ And y'all can't come close to me."
Work It (2002)
More broken beats, what sounds like the intro to Blondie's Heart Of Glass laid over a loping rhythm, and a needling, tweaked acid line. Taken from fourth album Under Construction it's menacing and loose.
On & On (2005)
The Neptunes' style - spaced out basslines, jerking, spare beats - are a perfect match for Elliott's voice. Here, Chad Hugo and Pharrell William place Elliott's hollering vocals in a landscape of filthy bass squalls and whip-crack snares.
A sopp to the dull
ROYKSOPP
THE UNDERSTANDING (WALL OF SOUND)
1/5
RYKSOPP'S first album appeared from under the unforgiving storm clouds of their native Norway back in 2001.
They were seemingly yet another band in a long, long line that started with Air and reached a nadir with Lemon Jelly, all of whom seemed to exist solely for their music to be anthologised on chill- out compilations, to be flogged to Audi-driving 30-somethings who wanted to feel they were still in touch with the dancefloor despite not having stepped inside a club since the early 1990s.
Ryksopp's debut album, Melody AM, was a bland, sugary confection which bleached the funk and fun out of dance music. Svein Berge and Torbjrn Brundtland's world is a perfunctory and rather dull one, where limpid facsimiles of dance music's sub-genres reside. Take 49 Percent, which in the right hands, could be an uplifting slice of gospel house. Chelonis R. Jones's whispered vocals are soulful and plaintive, halfway between Daft Punk collaborator Romanthony and Prince in ballad mode, but the music which surrounds it, rather than mirroring Jones's heartfelt mood, struggles to match his intensity. Undernourished percussion builds to a climax with some nicely- rolling cymbals, and the bass is warm as a summer swimming pool, but you yearn for the song to really take flight; after five minutes, it's still languishing, depressingly earthbound when it should be up in the clouds. And then it's over.
Things are rarely better elsewhere: Follow My Ruin is melancholy by numbers, with cheap 1980s drum fills and sweet, plangent synths parts tailor-made to press the right emotional buttons.
What Else Is There? - built around two samples, one from Jericho's Kill Me With Your Love, the other from The Drifters's Love Me, The Life I Lead - is grindingly lethargic and features some hideously overwrought female vocals, delivered by a Bjrk impersonator channelling horrid moping goths Evanescence.
About the only track here which doesn't make you grit your teeth is the album's lead single, Only This Moment, a fairly innocuous slice of twinkling dance-pop.
The Understanding is less an album than a marketing campaign for a lifestyle devoid of spontaneity and beauty; one where every last imperfection has been smoothed out, where everything is neat and ordered, when all you want is a little chaos.
