So what do you get when you take the funky, rootsy blues of Hip Route and add in the distinctive and raw vocals of Reef’s Gary Stringer? An infectious, bass-driven slab of sassy, low-end swagger and attitude filled earthiness, that’s what! Stringer makes the perfect vocalist for the song; his voice has the same wonderfully rasping delivery that Jim Blair’s does, the same rolling growl when pushing the note, so what he brings to the table is less a new sound, more a new level of intensity to the existing one.
Musically it plays to Hip Route’s strength’s – their ability to write concise, memorable rolling riffs, their skill at knowing how to thread the bear minimum together to great effect, to deliver sparse beats, spare yet pulsing bass lines and the fact that they write songs which without intentionally aiming for the commercial market are often as dance fuelled and rug cuttingly contagious as anything deliberately trying to play that game. Hip Route just do it at half the speed with a quarter of the beats and a fraction of the notes and still come out clear winners. If my memory of childhood Latin classes doesn’t fail me I think the scientific term for what we have here might be Groovus Maximus and if not, why not?
