"Pleasure And The Pain" - Project 23
Project 23 is Cleveland Watkiss' new drum & bass project on Dorado, and
being a fan of his from way back I was really looking forward to hearing it,
especially reading some of the comments about the thing from him and others
in mags like Straight No Chaser.
All of which makes this 12" doubly disappointing. It's not good drum & bass,
the vocals aren't up to much, and the lyrics are wack. The Peshay mix on the
flip is good stuff, but you could easily strip out all remaining traces of
the original and still have a great track. Watkiss is a great singer -
listen to him on Outside's "Big City" for example, but on "Pleasure" he's
not stretching himself at all - there's no tune worth speaking of and it
ends up sounding little different from the MC'ing he does at Metalheadz,
which I can't imagine anyone queueing up to hear in it's own right. The
lyrical content can be summed up as "I'm really into jungle ever since I
heard it on Kool FM in '92", which is the sort of cack-handed attempt at
establishing street credibility that I always hated in early attempts at
jazz rap - it's really only one step better than "Hey, we're rappers and
we're rapping over jazz". In other words one step better than really very
bad indeed.
All of the above makes it sound really awful. It isn't - it's OK, but just
nowhere near as good as I think anyone has a right to expect from someone as
talented as Cleveland Watkiss, especially in the light of his own hype about
what he's doing now.
..Mark..
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Mark Allerton Mark@warmspot.compulink.co.uk
http://www.compulink.co.uk/~warmspot/