Tali hails from New Zealand, but having flexed her lyrical muscle bouncing around the kiwi drum and bass scene she has now made the move to Bristol and her first album is upcoming on Roni Size’s Full Cycle label.
And there’s a fair amount of get up and go here, courtesy of programming from Messers Size, Krust, Die and Clipz. Singing and rapping in a fashion that mostly eschews the ragga style of spat out scat repetitions, there are four takes of energizing dancefloor fodder here, sandwiching the soulful trip-hop kick-backs ‘Don’t Blame Me’ and ‘Grey Days’.
With restrained touches of inevitable, self-conscious bling, the jack-hammer basslined ‘Lyric On My Lip’ perfectly demonstrates the New Zealander’s ability to mix up her style with some forthright rhymes, despite one enunciation problem. “Once I start/I just can’t quit,” rather comically, sounds like some declaration about “sausages”.
‘Blazin’, a clear Ms. Dynamite-influenced bid for the charts, infectiously brazens out its own redundancy clause: “betta run if you don’t want to roll with my bass.” With excerpts of song, double-time rhymes and more generic staccato firing, Tali provides enough variety to keep things interesting, and the economy of the track at 3.43 is judicious. Dillinja and Shy FX are to provide remixes when it drops in January as a single to prelude the February LP. The jazz guitar sample and high end electric piano lines on ‘Airport Lounge’ are kept buoyant by a good wedge of insistent snare and and augment a paean to leaving, returning and the resurrection of love. The heavy-hearted ‘Grey Days’ borrows from the epic orchestration and vinyl crackle of Portishead and casts the tones of an accented Dusty Springfield over the top.
Missing on the sampler but due for inclusion on the polished edition are the club banger ‘Satyric Styles’ and, more Ronnie Scott’s than Roni Size, the straight-outta-the-jazz-club vocals of ‘Kool Nites’.
As Kosheen, inexplicably, have ceased making credible and attractive dance music in favour of a rather bad souped-up impersonation of Texas with the baggage of some unchallenging house remixes, there is a gap in the sphere for some fast-paced-female-led-funking. Tali might just be the girl to fill it. D.Rose
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