Album Review: Dan Le Sac - Space Between The Words

Dan Le Sac's first album with beardy bard Scroobius Pip, 2008's Angles, polarised critics, but sales were respectable and the combination of beats and beat poetry appealed to listeners at a dry time for alternative hip hop. That was then. The glare cast by Scroob's sparkling wit is long gone, and we are now forced to readjust our eyes to the gloom.

Beats like these, without a significant slice of either guile or splendour, need a special and magnetic presence on the mic. It worked well before, with Le Sac seemingly happy to use his unremarkable produce to drive Scroobius Pip to the front of stage, but on this album there's nowhere to hide. Tuning goads Joshua Idehen into some majestic toasting for a minute, but it's a brief fling, on the rebound and soon forgotten. Sage Francis labelmate and professional business botherer B.Dolan is a good match on Caretaker, on which he cannons a heavy verse into the inviting vocal of Brit singer HowAboutBeth, but these are outlying results. The bulk of the album is uninspired, uninteresting and bone dry.

There is some chat about Le Sac and Pip releasing a third album together later this year, and a return to a proven dynamic will no doubt bring a better Dan. Until then, the space between the words is more like a chasm.

Space Between The Words is almost all straight man and no foil, and suffers heavily for it. Tonto. Robin. Garfunkle. Dan Le Sac.