King Cannibal – Let The Night Roar(2009)

Artist: King Cannibal
Title: Let The Night Roar
Label: Ninja Tune
Genre: Electronic

01. Intro 0:59
02. Aragami Style 6:14
03. Murder Us (Featuring Jahcoozi) 6:15
04. Virgo (Featuring Face-A-Face) 5:02
05. So… Embrace The Minimum 5:47
06. Dirt (Featuring Daddy Freddy) 4:57
07. Colder Still 6:07
08. A Shining Force 6:11
09. The Untitled 5:40
10. Onwards Vultures 5:31
11. Flower Of Flesh And Blood 6:39

Please give a fearful, uncomfortable but admiring and heartfelt roundof applause, please, for Ninja Tune’s first (only?) hard man – KingCannibal aka Zilla aka Dylan Richards. Coming through with arazor-edged, utterly uncompromising industrial mash-up of sounds andrhythms from dancehall and drum & bass, Radio 1’s Mary-Anne Hobbs hasalready declared his music to be "too dark!" And that was before shehad heard "Let The Night Roar," a record so obsessed with violence inits many manifestations that he named it after a quote fromnutter-cultist Jim Jones (that’s the man behind the JonestownMassacre).

Up until a couple of years ago, Zilla was best known for a series ofremarkable mix tapes, including "A Friendly Game of Chess" (w/ BuddyPeace), "One Foot In The Fire, One Fist In The Air" and compiling WatchAnd Repeat Play for warp Records (again with Buddy Peace). But KingCannibal was born when Richards began experimenting with using thesonic palette of drum & bass over dancehall rhythms. The track he madewas "Aragami Style". Not for nothing has Amon Tobin described it as "Agreat tune…put together like a DJ’s wet dream."

Richards used this as the leap-off point for the album which wouldbecome "Let The Night Roar". As he puts it, "This album is really aboutme laying out the core elements to the ‘brual deluxe’ sound of KingCannibal. For this project it was all about establishing what makes aKing Cannibal track and working to get those ingredients right and howthey translate through genre and mood switches."

"I never really meant to make music with a theme," Richards offers,"but at the half way point it really became clear that it had built itsown regardless of what i was consciously thinking. It is quiteobviously, sonically speaking, a violent piece of work, but where asmost albums who tackle this subject fall back on its links with horrorfilms I’ve really tried to make this about real life happening outsideof our windows, in our backyards and in our small lives. We get trappedinto thinking a certain way, doing things we don’t want to do just sowe can live to postpone our ambition another day. Its about cuttingthrough these things with a positive violence and letting ‘the nightroar’, for the night is when we finally get to do the things we reallywant to."

Tension and release, exhilaration and fear, sex and violence, all theelements of great music are here. Be afraid. Be very afraid.