Album Review: The Blue Lab Beats Show by Blue Lab Beats
Self-produced and newly independent, the London duo books dancehall next to boom-bap next to a Zulu vocal chant and makes the transitions disappear.
A Zulu vocal chant asking “Who can live with someone that hates them” starts one track. Staccato piano that recalls Banda Black Rio and Tania Maria dissolves into a hip-hop beat on another, while Stephen Hussey’s Urban Soul Orchestra strings—the same players who recorded with Soul II Soul—climb over both halves. A Jamaican MC invokes the Windrush generation and Benjamin Zephaniah over reggae. A London MC compares himself to Genghis Khan over boom-bap. NK-OK and Mr DM (the duo from North London who met as teenagers at WAC Arts College in Belsize Park around 2013, won a Grammy for their work on Angélique Kidjo’s Mother Nature, and have recorded as Blue Lab Beats through four albums before launching their own Blue Adventure Records) made every one of these sixteen tracks for The Blue Lab Beats Show—six of them instrumentals that range from the polyrhythmic density of “Piece of Life Puzzle” to mid-tempo drift, though a couple of them could trade places and nobody would know.
FourNine, on “Champions League,” says he never thought he’d make it out the ghetto, turns to wanting an empire “like Genghis Khan,” then says being pro-Black in this era can upset a staff member—”Too many hidden agendas.” He raps through all three moods at once, each grievance stacking on the last, the pile getting taller, while the piano loop underneath him stays on one warm phrase. Close friendships ended over what “Some hoes started.” His puzzle’s complete but still needs extra parts. It’s messy and real and you can’t tidy it. Jamila Woods takes “Slow Heart” somewhere completely different. She sings: “Did he bring you flowers/Did you talk for hours/Did you keep your power/Did you argue often/Words like hand grenades.” Then she flips it: “Did you bring him flowers/Did you feel the wind blow when he said your name/Did you lose your power/Did you think you shrank.” Same questions, opposite chairs—the best songwriting on the album, and it isn’t close.
The “Motivation” interlude, over soft piano, says something that sounds meant for a specific room, not a press release: “We can help build one another is the key to shifting the world.” Blackout JA, on “Fire Up,” chants over dancehall drums: “From the Windrush wi never hesitate to rebel/Break that chain colonial spell/Want equal rights the freedom as well/Bout 400 years now time will tell.” He names Benjamin Zephaniah, the Birmingham-born poet who rejected an OBE from the Queen in 2003 and said the word “empire” reminded him of how his foremothers were raped and his forefathers brutalized. Sanity follows: “Unity is lethal/So when we stand together/See the power in the people.” The outro names Jazz Refreshed, Women in Jazz, Tomorrow’s Warriors, and The Silhouette Project, goes from weekend arts college to winning a Grammy in two sentences, and ends on one word: “Peace.” It’s the only closer on the album that sounds like a real goodbye.
They were on Blue Note for two releases. The We Will Rise EP in 2021 and Motherland Journey in 2022. NK-OK started Blue Adventure Records in 2024 on what he called “barely any cash.” You could swap “Watermelon” and “Blue Lotus” without anyone noticing; they’re pleasant and a little dull, instrumentals that sound good in sequence but go quiet in your memory once the album’s over. But the vocal tracks tell you more about what NK-OK and Mr DM wanted this album to be than any of the instrumentals do. The Blue Lab Beats Show is the first full album with no major label attached, and the freedom shows in who they invited.
On “Piece of Life Puzzle,” NK-OK’s drum programming locks polyrhythmic patterns against a horn section whose lines crowd each other, the rhythm alive enough that finding the downbeat takes a full rotation. Every keyboard and bass part here was played by Mr DM. The bass on “North London Pace” runs at the same low frequency whether the genre around it has shifted from jazz to hip-hop to dancehall, and the staccato piano from that first track is still in the room when the outro says “Peace.”
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Champions League,” “Slow Heart,” “Fire Up”