Previous Industries - Service Merchandise (Album Review)
Thursday, 11 July 2024
Written by Jack Butler-Terry
Photo: Robyn Von Swank
For a minute it felt as though hip-hop’s axis had shifted, with wordplay and storytelling ushered out by lean, face tats and Soundcloud rap. What a relief it is, then, to hear ‘Service Merchandise’, the debut album from Previous Industries.
The group’s three members — Open Mike Eagle, Video Dave and STILL RIFT — are regular collaborators and old friends, most recently popping up together on Mike’s 2023 album ‘Another Triumph Of Ghetto Engineering’, and it shows. They have a wavelength.
That the album’s 11 tracks are named after long-lost mall relics and the trio use each entry to ruminate on memories of the soberingly-distant past.
Throughout, the project skips brash and braggadocious in favour of something more relatable and inviting.
There are humble introductions on Showbiz (“We're the new fools in town / And my sound’s laid down by the underground”) and those familiar with the work of any of the group’s individual members won’t be surprised to hear an album using jazz-tinged beats that embellish the low, slow delivery of the lyrics.
Produced by Child Actor, ‘Service Merchandise’ slips into a mode best navigated with a joint or a dram at the end of the day while you ruminate on the simpler things in life while bright horns and pensive keys ripple in the background.
Similarly, channelling hip-hop’s narrative masters such as MF DOOM, Ghostface Killah or Slick Rick is nothing new for these rappers, but in tandem they make ‘Service Merchandise’ an absolute breeze of a listen, the quirks and eccentricities of their flows creating an electric whole.
Without a single social media-ready clip to catapult their streaming numbers into the stratosphere, ‘Service Merchandise’ is a love letter to the analogue era that sits behind the noise of modern life, providing a much needed sanctuary for tired bones.
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