Artist: Attica Blues
Title: Blueprint
Format: 12" single
Label: Mo'Wax
Catalogue Number: MW038
Year of Release: 1995
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Tracklisting
A1 Blueprint
A2 Acapella
A3 Until Next Time
B1 Lonesome Child
B2 Supper Club (Atlanta Headz Mix)
B3 Bonus Beats
How to go from 45rpm to New York riots in four easy steps!
| 1. Take the lyrics of Blueprint (right), the final stanza of which mentions "rotation forty-five" 2. Which is by the band Attica Blues 3. Who were named after the (highly recommended,)1972 Archie Shepp album, the title track of which has to be the funkiest track ever written about... 4. The 1971 Attica Prison riots Easy! That was fun, wasn't it? And there was me thinking the band were named after an upstairs blues club. Check this photo of Archie Shepp, by the way, if there's ever going to be a posthumous Pipe-Smoker of the Year Award, it'll be a close call between Archie and Graham Chapman. |
Excursions through the inner mind's eye |
Blueprint is a good enough track, in a not-quite-Portishead way. A little bit Mono, a little bit Red Snapper, a little bit Alison Goldfrapp. I'm surprised the BBC haven't used it on a trailer yet.
It has some grand beatz (with a z, see) from D'Afro, nice strings, lovely female vocals, and an intriguing sample I couldn't quite place that goes "bee-oo-ee-ooh". There's a Plastikman remix on the (obligatory, at the time) remix 12" that really focuses on the "bee-oo-ee-ooh" noise, and is very good indeed. Sadly I only have that on CD. I'd recommend it though, the Slakked Plastik remix it's called.
"Accapella" may be a deliberate misspelling (I'm in a generous mood), because it ain't strictly 'without any other instrumental accompaniment'. I could be wrong though, as it's backed by a load of eerie noises that might just be derived from putting a shed-load of effects on the vocal track, then playing it backwards or something. Or they could have recorded it in a seriously weird chapel.
Until Next Time is a cheeky instrumental version of Blueprint, and this is where I got a little annoyed, because there aren't really six tunes on this 12", there's two. Side B's opener is just like the "Accapella", but Roba's just singing one word "Attica".
The you get the legitimately different tune Supper Club, but it's just beats and jazz samples really, which has been done better by others.
Finally, the Bonus Beats, whose sole purpose is to enable budding hip-hop DJs to do their very own remixes, but from a basement contemplation, archive excavation point of view, they're pretty damn pointless.
On the whole though, it's all good clean fun (except for the rioting and pipe-smoking, obviously).
