Beat Pharmacy - Wikkid Times

Beat Pharmacy’s fourth and most ambitious album is a collection of protest dub songs that combine deep and poetic lyricism of the very timely kind with atmospheric dub techno grooves. The result is a compelling and haunting record that is bound to float around in the listener’s head long after the music stops. Thick sub-dub basslines burble beneath reverberating chords while echoing melodies and textures dance atop syncopated grooves.

The album opens with the catchy ‘Rooftops’, vocalled by socially-conscious UK MC Coppa - think LKJ and the early Stereo MCs meets Luomo. On ‘Time’, Damon Aaron offers up a fragile folk-style vocal with a beautiful choral harmony that drifts in an out of the Augustus Pablo-style melodica. Kode9’s lyrical foil, the stentorian dub poet presence know as Spaceape, proves on both the more angular and abrasive productions ‘Strangers’ and ‘Ghostship’ why he is already the most sought-after mic-controller in the dubstep community, with his articulately oblique flows reminiscent of some of the greatest protest singers of our time.

Paul “Tikiman” St. Hilaire offers up two distinctly different vocals. On ‘Sunshine’ he croons his way through the bass heavy rhythm, while on ‘Nuclear Race’ it’s as if he was sitting next to you in a quiet room. With Ras B and Infinity also contributing, this is a mighty and throbbing rootical dub-tech Tower of Babel, with all the vocalists at the height of their not-inconsiderable powers, to assist Brendon Moeller in delivering an album of heartfelt innovation, free from glib preaching or musical cliché. As likely to chime with the ever-growing dubstep audience as it will with Beat Pharmacy’s already-deeply-embedded low frequency techno loving followers, ‘Wikkid Times’ is an album that deserves a place in the honour-roll of modern bass epics.

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