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NehruvianDOOM NehruvianDOOM Lex Records

13.10.14

Up until now, DOOM has never really sounded dated. While his last full length effort – 2012’s Keys To The Kuffs – wasn’t exactly bursting with vitality, his weathered, gravel-textured voice and often furious raps grated against a palette of harsh and jagged beats to create a sombre mood. Even if the Villain’s mask was beginning to rust, he’d still managed to deliver an album that sounded like nothing else out there.

NehruvianDOOM is the fruits of a laid-back collaboration with the 90s-obsessed teenage rapper Bishop Nehru. Alongside contributing a few verses and hooks, DOOM is credited as the record’s sole producer, and if you get the feeling that you’ve heard this stuff all before, that’s not so surprising – some of the instrumental material here is actually recycled from his series of Special Herbs compilations, which were released during the early to mid 00s.

Still, it’s fun to hear Nehru play around with internal rhymes over DOOM’s mutated jazz samples, and his adolescent perspective on bold ambition, skirt-chasing and wider social issues makes him a likeable MC. But – possibly due to a fault of the mastering rather than Nehru’s performance – the emotion in his voice actually sounds slightly muted in comparison to the debut mixtape which put him on DOOM’s radar in the first place. So while NehruvianDOOM ticks a lot of the right boxes for the nostalgic rap fan, it would be foolish to approach this as a significant chapter in DOOM’s career, and it would also be a little unfair to not expect greater things in the future from his young protégé.