LONG TIME DEAD
T-POWER
BOTCHIT AND SCARPER RECORDS
BY BRET MILLER
A few years after you’d stopped wondering whatever happened to Marc Royal, he drops in without fanfare and serves up Long Time Dead. A tasty collection of breakbeats and dark atmospherics, T-Power’s new album is full of surprises. First of all, this is a consistent CD, secondly it kicks ass, and thirdly it contains vocals from the likes of rapper Blade, singers Amaziree, Mee and Aroura Borialis.
Long Time Dead opens with So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. The title is taken from the hilarious last chapter in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. The song mixes pneumatic percussion, strings, acid squelches and smoky synths into a cinematic head-nodder. Running features the sinful vocals of Amaziree in a bass-heavy groove, Kool and Deadly has T-Power rocking his rhythm boxes, mixing techno and hip-hop styles, and American Psycho changes up the pervasive dark feel of the album with sliding horns, violins and a looser beat. But the real fun comes when Royal teams up with techno producer Si Begg on I Like That. The song has a joyous feel, with fun interplay between the acid boxes, head-snapping beats, vocal samples, and synthesizer loops.
After T-Power hit the scene as an intelligent junglist with the singles Mutant Jazz, Lipsing Jamring and Elemental as well as the excellent full-length Self Evident Truth of an Intuitive Mind he lost us with his lackluster follow-up Waveform. The Police State EP was cool but after this long you needn’t hesitate in giving Marc Royal another chance. Get to your local record shop and order Long Time Dead. Any album that gets your ass in motion and references Douglas Adams’ story about how the dolphins of earth take to the stars can’t be all that bad.
