Simon
review from http://gravitygirl.shafted.com.au/1003/013.html
- nephlim modulation systems - woe to thee o land whose king is a child - big dada
Like, shit, throw a big FUCK BUSH behind your disc in the tray-art and people'll forget the front-cover looks like a trance record, and they'll sure-as-hell notice that your futuristic-shit-to-me vision of this modern Americka is about as bleak as a London sky, 'specially when you cut up and recontextualise those GW samples so as he's calling his own home-o-th-brave government a cabal of cold-blooded terrorists. That Big Jus holds a candle for his Co-Flow days and builds in blocks of looming minor-key piano chords, squalling radio-static, and dirtier-than-your-window after-its-been-attacked-by-a-intersection-squeegee-hippy breaks makes things seem even more grim; and this goes with those gruff rhymes about our "civilisation/hell" and "living in a world of hate" that get angry whilst the alien-landing mellotron tones loom in amongst those words; all this a downer taking hip-hop down from fanciful braggadocio to the unlikely place of socio-politicko commentary. So grab the mic, right, and the reportage of Jus and his Nephlim Modulation Systems from the embedded frontlines sees it all as a "re-run of a bad movie", presenting this present moment as a creepy science-fiction wasteland that feels like a sci-fi flick even if it doesn't look like it. The battles on this disc are less t'do with dick-clutching cipher pipers and are more t'do with the power-games playing out b'fore our eyes; and it's that realisation that makes things so desolate when you look at it; like 1984 is finally dawning in 2003, with the first war of the 21st century on screens as televisual fodder. But where this war's ugly reality dwells in desert settings, here Jus transposes the struggle, and sketches scenes whose blackhearted colour-schemes match heartless reality with artistic metaphor; here the Child King ordering the killings of many from atop his misty mountain clifftop fortress. The record's ringing refrain is hardly the stuff of car commercials, either, Jus basically saying: woe to thee, woe to you, woe to me; if this is the leader of the free world, this modern earth is as bleak as so many prophesised.
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