Neil Landstrumm – Lord For £39

Landstrumm has been around for ages now on the underground electro bass margins he may even been one of the pioneers and even ahead of the game at times. He is damn good at cooking up a sort of techno / electro / breakbeat / rave / dubstep thing even before dubstep was called dubstep. So can he keep it up with his new album for Planet Mu?

Well I’m slightly torn about that, Lord For £39 has its moments for sure but there seems to be a little something missing.

The production is really top quality, as you would expect from Landstrumm. Full on bass sounds, bleeps a plenty plus punchy, crunchy drums are all over these tracks.

So it’s not the sounds, it must be the songs. There is nothing really bad about them by any means. They revive a low budget (hence the name Lord for £39) bleepy rave electro sound, but the tracks don’t really stick in your head for to long. Don’t get me wrong there is a sense of cheeky fun to the album and some of the tunes will no doubt shake a dance floor.

I just get the feeling it has all been done before, by the likes of Si Begg who even appears on some of the tracks or even electro heads like The Hacker or LFO. I can also hear echoes of Radioactive Man in tracks like Nike Volume.

Highlight include the big booty number Shit Daddy Bass with it’s large low end, gritty dancehall breaks’n’bleeps plus Carlton Killawatt toasting on top. Old Rabbits has some balls I guess in a Robokop kind of way. One of the more dreamy tracks The King Of Malta works pretty well, the twinkles and blips move into some dirty electronica to make a nice track. The driving Gameboy dancehall number The Dose with Ebola is also pretty effective. The final track Ross Kemp as Pixel needs a mention just for it’s massive bass tones and the icing on the cake that is a John Peel sample.

Lord For £39 leaves me a little bit cold overall like a tramp stuck out side a club asking for a smoke. The odd moment catches you and takes you on an electro rave journey but there is nothing revolutionary about it.