Hector Bizerk

Hector Bizerk

Nobody Seen Nothing

(www.hectorbizerk.com)

There's more of a full-band feel to hip-hop duo Hector Bizerk's follow-up to their 2012 debut album (which went by the self-explanatory title of Drums. Rap. Yes.); more commercial appeal, too, among the lively bass lines, keyboard chords and tighter song structures of Orchestrate and Welcome To Nowhere. However, it's still the smart mouth of rapper Louis and counterpart punch of drummer Audrey Tait that fuel this particular fire with rhythms and rhymes as muscular as the hero of a Peter Howson painting. The sound of the words tripping over Louie's tongue can be as mesmerising as the thoughts they contain, and here he ups his political stance and sharpens his social observation so that sometimes he comes across like John Cooper Clarke caught in a Venn diagram between James Kelman, Irvine Welsh and Aiden Moffat (Party At A&E and My Little Bigots being two superb cases in point). That, of course, is only half the story: Tait's flurries across the tom-toms and snaps on the snare deliver short adrenaline bursts in themselves.

Alan Morrison