The Beat Surrender

As with a lot of people, I didn’t really get into Stero MCs until they had a bit of success with their brilliant Connected album. I remember at the time it was coming out they went out on tour with the by then bedraggled Happy Mondays who were touring their ill fated (but much loved by me at least) Yes Please album.

I didn’t get chance to go see that tour but pretty much everyone who did to a man (or woman) said that they blew The Happy Mondays off stage and things just seemed to go on from there for them. They had huge hits with Connected and Step It Up, two tracks that have aged really well and still fill dancefloors to this day if I ever give them a spin at one of my club nights.

They were on top of the pops, the album was a Mercury Music Prize Nominee, losing out to a very deserving Suede at the time, they had huge World Tours and seemed to have the world at their feet…except it seemed they didn’t want that, instead they retreated into the studio and the background for a number of years, returning years later with a much changed musical landscape to navigate.

For me they’ve never come close to emulating that period in their career (and i’m including the previous album Supernatural in that time frame as well), the last few albums have been really disappointing affairs and Paradise suggested to me that it was possibly time for them to pack it in and leave theire legacy still in tact, I certainly couldn’t see them adding to it in a positive light anyway.

But cometh the hour, cometh the band and with Double Bubble I think personally they’ve had a real unexpected return to form, showing that they can still be at the cutting edge of things and can maintain the quality over a full album as opposed to the odd single that we’ve seen in recent years.

Part of the reason for this freshness in their sound must be credited to beats man Tic Tac who at 19 years of age has infused some of his youthful feel into the album. You know from the marker setting electro funk of Get On It that they are back with a vengeance and things don’t let up after that.

The Here & Now is a probing track that ebbs along, Karaoke sees a disilusioned Rob talk of the “same shit, another day”. Pictures and Black Gold both sound and feel like Ian Brown songs, rather than hip-hop it’s a sort of downbeat pop with hushed vocals and both tracks work really well.

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