Fun Lovin Criminals are live hip-hop. Or, to be more exact, live-instrument hip-hop, as the best hip-hop - regardless of its reliance on 'real' instruments or not - is possibly the livest music genre on the planet.
They are vocalist/guitarist Huey, drummer Steve and multi-instrumentalist Fast and you may well hear more of them in future months with this album poised for crossover success. That's not to say that this is a great album. It starts promisingly with the band's theme tune, an accoustic twang and harmonica backing up a lively House of Pain style rap with a smart funk bounce. It's followed by "Passive Aggressive", a potential hit single, with its chilled rap cutting into a bluesy, bruising Rage Against the Machine style chorus. Then there's "The Grave and the Constant", a chilled city-night atmosphere.
But "Scooby Snacks" starts a run of lacklustre songs with its cringeingly obvious Tarantino samples and an overdose of wannabe-hard images. What follows demonstrates the Fun Lovin Criminals two weak points. Firstly, they patently obviously are *not* criminals, and their raps ring false next to the malevolence of the best of the rest of the east-coast scene (you don't *have* to be a real criminal, but you *do* have to create that *shiver* in the listener). Secondly, their reliance on live instrumentation makes their sound too traditional, where the best hip-hop of the moment sounds otherworldly. "Bombin the L" is about two-notes away from being "Smoke on the Water" and therefore loses F.L.C. *vast* amounts of kudos - and dollars if Deep Purple's lawyers hear it!
But things pick up *dramatically* after that. "Can't Get With That" contrasts warm summer days and neighborhood violence nicely and "King of New York" has a super-fly Starsky and Hutch thang going on. "Bear Hug" has a warped-sleaze bass-line and *vicious* harmonica with a rugged sneer skittering over the top. Then there's the soulful whisper of the title-track and the closing "Methadonia", all tijuana brass and soaring harmonica - the theme to "Midnight Cowboy" as the credits fade out over a crack-den.
The raps are usually interesting, the production lush, and the style nicely varied, pitching them closer to the UK Acid Jazz scene than the hip-hop scene they'll be lumped in with in the States. They manage to crossover without resorting to the usual lumpen distortion-ridden rap-rock and they've produced a debut album which despite a few hiccups is not bad at all. So don't be too scared to part with the cash if you like that single when you see it on MTV.
