Bang On! – [sic]

The debut from 21-year-old Liverpudlian rapper Elliott Egerton expresses the frustrations, tensions and mundanity of inner-city poverty with disarming directness and black humour. Although Egerton’s accent swerves between scouse and cockney, his lyrics are deeply grounded in Liverpool life, from his claim that “Liverpool City Council invented spending cuts”, to the proliferation of local dialect: the “busies patrol here slow”, constantly hunting the LP’s cast of disaffected youth who “fleece beak for their keep”. 

Musically, [sic] has a similar sense of rough-edged, bedroom authenticity: most tracks are based around simple grime or hip-hop beats, generally with a harsh, distorted aggression that matches the belligerence of the rapping, while melodic loops and samples are kept to a minimum. Yet Egerton’s obsessive documentation of the everyday also feels like a kind of maximalism; and ultimately it’s this sense of desperate compulsion which ensures that, while [sic] lacks subtlety, it has an arresting fierceness and candour.