Sound Advice: Tomb Crew.
September 7, 2008
“We’re not a band” proclaims the obligatory Myspace page, “we’re a lot”. No arguments there; frequently packing out stages from Shoreditch to Brighton in matching t-shirts bearing the Tomb Crew legend, the collective launch brain-busting and crotch-melting mixes of hip-hop and rabid jungle-funk that nails smiles to faces and thrashes around like an infant stomping through a field of glass in daddy’s Timberlands.
Having set up shop in the Red Room of Nottingham’s Stealth, Tomb Crew were always going to go down well with the grime set but as they spread their wings further afield in 2008/9 the test will come as to their ability to transcend their position as mash-up competentès with something more sustained. Sure, we can gurn merrily for days to their blend of grime, hip hop and dense beats that gleefully rip n’ run after surgically embedding the vibrate mechanism from your phone into your knees, though it’s the irresistible blend of concrete, jungle, scattergun MC-ing and knowing nuggets of slippery urban pop that cements these boys the mash-up and remix DJs of tomorrow. Indeed, the resident sets at club night Fresh Out Of Death have an atmosphere of unconditional fandom that would make the My Chemical Romance hardcore blush, but this is simply par for the course: light fixtures and other fittings sway as the dancefloor bounces with all the boozy pathos and closing-time togetherness of Shane MacGowan taking that guy from ‘Shameless’ to a lock-in round Ronnie Wood’s. The indier-than-thou hipsters may snort but, as the grinning converts will attest, Tomb Crew is very much the inebriated and debauched sound of Fun. You know what that is, right?
