‘It’s not bad rap, I just don’t feel it. There. I said it.’

Wait. Is it really the case that a rapper responsible for such wonderful ironic, self-ironising, re-ironising, so-ironic-it-could-do-your-ironing statements should inspire a reviewer to use this self-same lyric as a description of his act? Ach.

Doseone is beautiful. His leather jacket hangs prettily over a short but broad frame topped with a sweet smiling face which bobs its way through the crowd during the warm-up acts and dips its Mohican in time with the inferior DIY electro hum leaking from the stage. There is no question that when he gets his chance he will be audience-inclusive, witty, mobile, and good-looking enough to put in your pocket and take home.

But? But where? But where is he? Is it his fault – or is it the fault of a mediocre, table-dancing, nigh-on hippy what? Pegged? Some kind of crowd halfway between Stoke Newington and Dalston asking to be validated in their love of avant hip-hop? No. It is not their fault. For if it is, it is my fault too, and the fault of the friends who have so eagerly agreed to meet me at a Themselves gig, when so many other ideas would leave them cold.

At no point do the fast-rap lyrics sway out into the slower, more intelligible, fresh and insightful statements about modern life.

What then? It’s not the suggestion that Ice Cube would have made a more interesting president than Obama, or the semi-coherent rant against downloading music for free. Perhaps it’s that I don’t know the Themselves catalogue as well as I ought. But the fact that they end the night with the track ‘It’s Them!’ – clearly their best song, yet which they fail to even complete (hence leaving out the quote at the start of this review), and the fact that at no point do the fast-rap lyrics sway out into the slower, more intelligible, fresh and insightful statements about modern life which their album tracks are replete with, perhaps these are the facts that stop the heat generating the spark which would set me alight.

Damn. It is hard to be hard on Themselves. Doseone is too there, too sociable, too intelligent, too good a rapper. But the totality of his persona on record doesn’t translate. Buy buy buy the records of Themselves. And have Doseone dance forever through your neural pathways in absence instead.

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Go get FREEhoudini here

REST OF TOUR:

May 3rd – IRELAND Dublin, Whelan’s
May 5th – BELGIUM Brussels, AB Club

May 7th – RUSSIA St Petersburg, A2 (w/ Odd Nosdam)
May 8th – RUSSIA Moscow, Actzal (w/ Odd Nosdam)
May 9th – ITALY Marina di Ravenna, Hana-Bi
May 11th – POLAND Krakow, Club Re
May 13th – SWITZERLAND Lausanne, Le Romandie
May 14th – SWITZERLAND St Gallen, The Palace
May 15th – GERMANY Munich, Feierwerk
May 16th – GERMANY Hamburg, Hafenklang

May 17th – GERMANY Leipzig, Ut Connwitz