OK, what the hell is this? I mean, I know what it is in the literal sense—it’s a CD, it’s called Boy In Da Corner and it’s the debut from 19-year-old Dylan Mills (a.k.a. Dizzee Rascal). I furthermore know it’s the recipient of last year’s Mercury Prize, it was the darling of the British press and Mills was stabbed before one of his performances. I know all of this. Now—what the hell is this?
Each pass through only renders the contents more inscrutable. Mills’ world is constructed from heat-warped synth lines and dry-humping beats that are creepy the way Tricky’s used to be before he met Anthony Kiedis. Mills doesn’t rhyme, he hyperventilates. His street-Brit accent renders the bulk of his verbiage incomprehensible; the words seem to get all gobbed up in his throat as the near-goth synth tracks throw sick little fits behind him. There’s barely anything to these songs, just the lone keyboard line, the skittering beat and Mills’ sub-Cockney patois.
It’s this very absence of sound that makes Boy In Da Corner so compelling. It repels busyness, favoring instead a kind of haunted-forest openness inside which Mills can spit and stammer and strike. Boy In Da Corner is nervy and vicious, loosely categorizable as U.K. garage but having about as much to do with that genre as Björk does with techno. It’s the sound of the Neptunes getting knocked out of orbit. It’s a Pong machine breaking down. It’s a cipher, a mystery box, a hieroglyph in a tracksuit. Jesus. What the hell is this?
—J. Edward Keyes
