Slum Village

Essential Festival 2000

Saturday 15th to Sunday 16th July 2000
Stanmer Park , Brighton, England

I only reached Falmer Park at 2pm thanks to an unreliable lift down from so-called mates (you know who you are), which meant I missed New Flesh for Old's futuristic beats and rhymes, but was just in time to check out the band that the press and PR men would have you believe are the natural successors to A Tribe Called Quest. While they undoubtedly have talent, the boys from Detroit are no ATCQ and unfortunately their live show at Essential confirmed this. While they aren't the worst crew I've ever seen, they never really got the hip-hop tent rocking, in part due to producer Jay Dee's smoothed out, snare-heavy tracks, none of which compare with the work he did with ATCQ. Slum Village were preceded by Jay Dee's new protégé Fat Kat, who has been generating a little buzz on the underground scene with his new 12" (the name escapes me) which he dropped to a lukewarm reception before making way for the main act.

They ran through plenty of tracks from their recent debut 'Fantastic Vol. 2', including 'I Don't Know', 'Hold Tight' and 'Jealousy' but it never really took off except when they dropped the bassier 'Raise It Up' to finish off their set having brought their dancers on stage to hype the crowd. While the emcee's T3 and particularly Baatin have got charisma, they are basically party and bullshit emcees and this combined with the lack tuff beats in their repertoire meant that they never really got the (early afternoon) crowd fired up. Even the heads who knew every song were doing nothing more than nodding along to most tunes.

I saw Slum Village at last year's Glastonbury and they didn't cut the mustard then either, so maybe it's just a festival thing, but unfortunately they were far from essential in Brighton.

review by: Ill Will