Various Artists - Well Deep: Ten Years of Big Dada Records

Filed under: Eric Saeger, Music Reviews   

Eric Saeger

It’s not absolutely essential to have reams of information uploaded to your skull in order to get a handle on indie hip-hop, but over the years Big Dada has been home to the most bizarre trips and aliases in the underground. Albeit a British label, the Ninja Tune-owned company has provided workout space for stateside slam-preacher Saul Williams and MF Doom, the latter working under his Monsta Island Czars alias King Geedorah and teamed up with Mr. Fantastik in the arid, opium-den-rap classic “Anti-Matter.” It’s misleading to infer that this album actually has all 10 years covered; the first release on the label (Misanthropic’s Alpha Prhyme 12”) isn’t accounted for, and the earliest nugget on board is of 1999 vintage (“Movements,” a dub-splashed tune from Dada’s bread-and-butter act Roots Manuva). Nitpicking gets us nowhere, however, in the face of all this top-drawer, easily accessible stuff, such as “Night Night Theme” (the denouement track from Gun Hill Road, a saving-Brooklyn-from-bad-jiggyness fantasy LP from Infesticons) and Lotek HiFi’s “Percolator.”

Posted on February 10th, 2008.

• Grew Trio: “It’s Morning”
• Bass Tone Trap: “Trapping”
• Backlash: “Heliotrope”
• Studio One Scorcher : Studio One Scorcher
• Brothers Past: “This Feeling’s Called Goodbye” (SCI Fidelity Records)