Ruok
"A true innovator, MBM main man Jack Dangers helped lay down the rules for  dub-inflected electronica, throwing down heavy breaks atop challenging  experimental sound."  --CMJ"For R.U.O.K?, [Dangers has] loosened the spring of his coil, but not the  potency of his dusted dub.  4 stars."  --MIXER"Intriguing and intimidating....Dangers' cultural osterizing evolves  to the nth degree of studio sophistication..."  --ROLLING STONE"The sounds of futuristic riddims that both predate electronic genre  nicknames and mock their ideals; one that may be defined purely by its  sphere of influence on modern music."  --URB"This is the most welcome comeback since Sly kicked that commie's ass in Rocky IV.  9/10."   --VICE"Without MBM's groundbreaking amalgams of hip-hop and industrial dance  music, modern dance music genres such as Big Beat and Drum & Bass wouldn't  exist...one of Britain's most inventive practitioners of sampladelic funk."  --ALTERNATIVE PRESS"Without Meat Beat Manifesto, there'd be no Chemical Brothers..."  --SELECT MAGAZINEAfter one of his more negligible dance tracks became the ass-kicking, bullet-dodging anthem ofThe Matrix, just what the hell was Jack Dangers supposed to do? Refashion his own myth, apparently. On his seventh Meat Beat Manifesto album,R.U.O.K?, Dangers dumps the cramped, sample-heavy confines of his last three albums, including his commercial-friendly 1998Actual Sounds + Voices, for a visceral feel as immediate and confrontational as his first gritty post-industrial recordings some 13 years ago.Which is not to say the samples are gone so much as they’re pushed around, bullied into second-class status by Dangers’ renewed awareness of sonic depth. The Meat Beat Manifesto classics "God O.D." and "10X Faster Than the Speed of Love" were built around basic dub principles like a murderously deep bass line that rolls like a slammed Cadillac and lots of airy space peppered with percussion sounds, and it’s these elements that define every track on R.U.O.K? The most eerily cool thing about "Spinning Round" isn’t the quiet whirling talisman sound Dangers has used before, but the intangible silence between the bass and a very lonely tambourine. Even "What Does It All Mean," featuring copious amounts of turntablistdu jourZ-Trip’s freestyle scratching, takes on an earthier live hip-hop immediacy thanks to Dangers’ restrained use of synths and layered breakbeats. And there’s Dangers’ collaboration with The Orb’s Alex Paterson, "Horn of Jerico," a hypnotic funk excursion track every bit as psychedelic as anything either of them have released separately. Aside from "Spinning Round," little onR.U.O.K?possesses commercial cache, but what is that against a career-defining turn?Heath K. Hignight--From URB MagazineThe ¸ber-lord of breakbeat"; "If you've been studying hard at Fatboy Slim's  Junior High Beat School, maybe its time to graduate to the Meat Beat  Academy"  --MELODY MAKER (UK)