Singles

Shuffle - What'sthatyougot?

Tim Miller 07/05/2007

Rating: 2/5

Described as “described as indescribable, there are no easy tags for Shuffle”, it is nevertheless my job to attempt to do so. Such is life, huh. Best summarised by their PR as fusing punk, jazz and funk, this single should be a riotous mess of beats and rhythms, noise and melody, progression and innovation - but it isn't quite.

Plinking to life with a descending SNES line and a straight, banging punk beat of sorts, snatches of muted guitar chords play in between a fairly funky bass line before the spoken vocals, approaching the sort of British Hip Hop stylings of Kano, roll up and over the top of this base. The single is punctuated throughout with quirks of turntable scratchings and electro blobs, and, being as it is energetic and pacey, burns itself out inside two and a half minutes.

Sure, it's a fusion of bits and pieces from various places that amalgamate into a fun, harmless enough single that sits somewhere between hip hop and funk. There's also a b-side here, Needles, which for my money is actually better than Whatsthatyougot?: certainly the guitars are more inventive and the song's progression touches more on a musically successful merging of the aforementioned genres. But essentially it's the same sort of mash up as the a-side, and that happens to be the kind of brash, big beat eclecticism that someone like Fatboy Slim or Basement Jaxx would knock up as hasty album filler.


Released today.

Shuffle's MySpace