M-PHAZES - ‘GOOD GRACIOUS’
Published: The Vine, April 1, 2010.
M-Phazes
Good Gracious
(Obese)
There are a couple of diverging conversations on the post Hilltop Hoods, Oz hip-hop landscape. One line of thought reads that maybe it’s time to banish the term “Australian hip-hop” altogether, that the possibility of domestic product transcending borders in a commercial sense necessitates a loosening of its staunch identity; a set of signifiers that the community’s senior players worked so hard and so long to establish.
The other school of thought – and the more popular one, it seems – is a little more pragmatic. Or, one might suggest, defeatist. It reads that the commercial success of acts like the Hoods, Bliss N Eso, The Herd and others evidences one thing: that the Oz hip-hop signature has found a lucrative market (in relative terms) on home turf. Why look outside?
This little conundrum lies at the heart of Good Gracious, the hugely anticipated debut from M-Phazes. In a relatively short though immensely prolific career, Melbourne via Gold Coast producer has forged a reputation as Australia’s beat-maker par excellence, dropping floor-shaking joints for a host of Australian and international MCs – from Bliss N Eso and Drapht, to Pharoahe Monch, Amerie, Kenn Starr, CL Smooth and Skyzoo – as well as turning some serious heads in the finals of the 2008 One Stop Shop beat battle in the US.
Put simply, M-Phazes is an Australian producer who has already garnered significant international reach. If anyone was primed to drop a record that could break through the US divide, it might just have be him. And from its first couple of joints – the soulful, brass stabbed groove of ‘For What it’s Worth’, blessed by impeccably smooth flow of Horrorshow’s MC Solo, and the huge, gritty boom-bap of ‘Where’s Elvis’, with Perth oddity Drapht on the mic – Good Gracious ticks all the boxes in the quality stakes. M-Phazes’ production is superb here, weaving intricate hooks, samples and instrumental details into maximal, colossally scaled kicks and stinging, snapping snares.
MC of the moment, Mantra, spits rapid-fire verses all over ‘The Freak Show’ while veteran master-rapper Delta explodes over the earth-shattering ‘Home’. Obese kingpin Pegz’s soul-drenched ‘Blind Man’ and the classic blaxploitation funk of Dialectrix’s ‘The Facilitator’ are further highlights.
But herein lies the issue with Good Gracious. Every single one of its 15 tracks features an Australian MC (or in the case of Nine High, a trio of Australian-based UK MCs), and while the aforementioned few tear it to pieces, others let the team down in a big way. That bastard child of Australian rap, Pez, sounds like a 14-year-old on his first sixpack and espouses everything that is ugly about the Australian attitude on the prodigiously terrible ‘The Club Song’, while Phrase’s foray into auto-tuned electro pop on ‘Music Box’ is resolutely awkward.
But a couple of weak tracks aren’t really the problem here. Good Gracious is an incredibly well balanced record and one that exemplifies M-Phazes’ deft ability to craft not just a kicking beat, but a full-length album of them. The crux is that, with so many Australian MCs and such a lack of instrumental tracks or international guests, it feels as though there’s nowhere else for this release to go. It’s an great record, but Good Gracious is nailed to a distinct time and a place.
Who knows why it happened this way. It might have been the whim of Pegz and co. at Obese, or perhaps even M-Phazes himself. But in the context of the sheer quality of his beats and the scope of his US admirers, you can’t help but feel that M-Phazes could have made an international statement with this debut.
Good Gracious didn’t have to be a great Australian hip-hop record; it could have been a great hip-hop record, that happened to be from Australia. There’s no disrespect in looking beyond your own backyard.
Dan Rule
