Recent Decents #10 — Incognito-Rap, Summer-Soul, Spoken-Punk

King Geedorah, Garfield Fleming, Dry Cleaning

These 3 tracks come straight out of the queue for the recycling centre on a typical Saturday morning. With bags of garden waste piled up to my neck around me in the car, I’ve got a guest DJ spot to a very receptive crowd of one.

These are the tracks I’m spinning for myself.

Obviously though, with the window cracked in the hope that someone else will hear and we’ll share that nod of knowing approval that music heads do.

1. King Geedorah, “I Wonder”, 2013

There’s no bigger thrill than discovering a new artist. Stumbling across this 2013 hip hop album, Take Me To Your Leader, has been a big discovery for me over the past month. It took me until this week to actually look into the artist and realise that I’d already discovered this artist a few times already.

King Geedorah is a pseudonym for the legendary MF DOOM. A sign of the level of output we’re talking about is that he could put out such high-quality records without reputation.

This track is in because of the effort that’s gone into the sample. The main theme from the 1998 Brazilian drama, Central do Brasil, wouldn’t be the first place I’d look for a sample but the flowing strings run through the whole track.

2. Garfield Fleming, “Don't Send Me Away”, 1980

With the first few glimpses of the sun in 2021 coming this weekend, just skip straight to summer and drop the needle on this proper earworm.

Nothing too fancy here — great melody, deep soul voice and a chorus that will stick with you.

This one came to me via a brilliant Spotify playlist courtesy of the Soultwins, the self-described “pair of bald DJs" from Manchester known for pulling out hidden gems. The playlist was in collaboration with the British Culture Archive, which documents the real-life social history of the UK. Both well worth checking out.

3. Dry Cleaning, “Dog Proposal”, 2019.

Dry Cleaning is getting the full treatment at the moment as they’re tipped all over for the big time. Rightly so too.

Hard to pin down but with punk sensibilities, put simply they are great riffs are spoken over by vocalist, Florence Shaw. She lays into her subjects. On this track, she goes for the myth of hard work, glory-hunting football fans and to a woman she overheard talking about a dog proposal.

The tracks “Magic of Meghan” and, especially, “Scratchcard Lanyard" have already made a big impact — Brett Anderson of Suede has called them “easily the most exciting thing I’ve heard in a while”. That’ll do for me.