The most striking thing about former Anti Pop Consortium rapper Beans' album is its firm bid to embrace UK hip hop - and thereby techno, ragga and garage break beats. Perhaps this is not surprising.
It's often been said that Anti Pop Consortium drew their inspiration from too broad a source to fit classifications such as hip hop, electronica or dance. But this forgets that each one of these genres developed as boundary challenging movements that reached beyond convention to create new musical spaces. And in this respect Anti Pop Consortium's music, under the guidance of producer Earl Blaize, was more hip hop (or anything else) than the formulaic versions that are accepted as representatives of the genre today.
In a way then Beans' solo album, like his earlier work with Blaze, is continuing the journey that began in Harlem in the late Seventies. And like the innovators of that period his work draws his inspiration from the US and Europe, sucking throbbing techno into the sparing, snapping snare drum arrangements.
This said, the most obvious comparison for 'Tomorrow Right Now' remains Roots Manuva's 'Run Come Save Me' and the UK's bouncement brigade. And the comparison is a favourable one all round.
The full extent of the connection is unleashed in the 'Witness' like techno boogie of 'Raping Silence' and the throbbing, acidic New Flesh-esque 'Hot Venom'. Like Manuva, Beans' lyrical content draws on the long-tradition of rap's sensual observation, referring to taste ("cinnamon on my tongue") to convey the message on the offbeat funk of 'MuteScreamer'.
Elsewhere Beans picks-up the APC gauntlet and runs rap further into avant garde obscurity with the radio dial shimmering of 'Sickle Cell Hysteria' and the broken electronic jazz arrangements of 'Rose Periwinkle Plum'.
As a whole Beans' production is minimal but never threadbare - even when he pulls things right back to just his expressive rap and his own "amateure" beatbox on 'Crave' or the lyrically replete spoken word of 'Booga Sugar'. Beans has got his runnings sorted and, as the man says, the future is in his hands.
by Ben Osborne