dj yoda - the amazing adventures of ..

after years of thrilling crowds with his deft turntable skills, his unique film+dialogue cutup experiments, and his well received fun filled thug free mixtapes, the man with the george lucas fixation gets around to releasing his first proper artist focussed album.

so, gone are all the gags, gone are all the silly montages, and gone is all the fun, yoda wants to become a serious artist.

in fact, if there is one rule that this album adheres to, it is the old 'if it aint broke dont fix it' as the 60 minutes is a total scratch-fest, advert ripping filled monster the follows on from the mixtapes.

across the 24 tracks are the usual messed snippets of film dialogue, the usual 6th form humour and tons of aural sillines. of course a full album of this would be tiresome, so amongst the ones-and-twos excess, are a few proper tracks with guest vocalists, and what guests !

old school hero, biz markie appears twice, declaring his love for all things breakfast on the smilesome breakfast cereal, princess superstar gives it her all, in the wonderfully self referential big band jazz cut up, let's get old, label mates aspects drop in on the spiky moody electro beast that is the brush off (reminding listeners to use their teeth cleaning gadgets on a regular basis), and then there is the party hip hop joint, playin' around featuring the jungle brothers which is exactly in line with everything fine-n-funky.

other notables to be mentioned, mc paul barman, on the sped up fruityloop freakiness, salaam, which dripts into a manic drum and bass mess, and naturally, the live show fave, duelling banjos is dropped into the funk.

as is to be expected for an album that has taken years of hard craft and intense sample clearance, the attention to miniscule sonic detail within the advert styled intersections is quite astonishing, thus making the album reveal itself more and more with each listen, though the use of an old level 42 loop for recent single wheels may stray a little too close to the edge for some.

in the wrong mood such frivolity can be off putting, but taken as an alternative to the stunted bland thug productions from all the g-unit wannabes, (ya gotta check the fiddy track if you, like me, find the appeal of 50 cent somewaht baffling), this album provides a exciting blast of rainbow colour, and a chunk of rump shaking old school hip hop.