Until now, Tom Boogizm has mostly released complex DJ mixes and radio sets drifting between dancehall, bass, techno and all sorts of genres that really ought to come with quotation marks. Although – is “released” even the right word? His music, including the beat tapes under his own name, is more something that gets let loose, seeping into a very small public sphere. With a bit of luck, you stumble across it – and let it overwhelm you. His flood of releases as Rat Heart remains pleasantly opaque. Last year, a single on Modern Love showed just how densely and uncannily his aim could be realised: to drag songwriter and soul music through oil slicks and dust, then sand it all down afterwards. Now that impulse culminates in Dancin’ In The Streets, an album that is nothing less than a small sensation.
»OPERATION ALWAYS BE A BRAVE LITTLE CUNT« is a kind of distorted power ballad, built around a shuffling, whip-crack beat wrestling with Boogizm’s barely decipherable voice, while elsewhere gnarly guitars play into the fog and small piano flecks from guest contributor Cansu Kandemir swirl around them. On »I DON’T KNOW YET«, spooky underworld folk pulls the shutters down, seasonally appropriate. Hardly any track uses more than three ingredients – and even these seem more interested in what cannot be heard: the invisible, the unsaid, the unreal. A late, major highlight of the year.
