Arctic Reviews

By any standards Urban Myth is a remarkable record. Not perhaps remarkable in being musically ground breaking - far from it on that score - but nevertheless remarkable is about the most appropriate word I can grab when attempting to document it. Obviously, I now need to explain why.

For starters, despite being released in 2009, the sleeve notes reveal that Urban Myth was actually recorded almost a decade earlier. Not that this explains the nature of it's content, but we'll come back to that later. Then there's the sleeve notes, credited to somebody called Roger Thomas and written in the style of one of those fake emails you get saying that you've won three million quid but have to pay two hundred to have it delivered. Revolving around a culinary theme, Thomas draws comparisons between the music and such delicacies as tomato puree, black pepper and garlic, finally pronouncing that the combination will leave "No indigestion here". Short of having Syd Barret pen a few lines about your record circa 1971, it's possibly the most non-linear appreciation imaginable.

As previosuly stated, other than it's vintage, the music is about the least interesting aspect of Urban Myth. A Londoner, Charlie Acquah-Danso now lives in Manchester, and based on this evidence is a man clearly obsessed with the metropolitan crossover eighties funk and jazz of the likes of George Benson, along with echoes of mid-noughties soul, hip-hop and even a dash of the long forgotten and mercifully brief prodigy movement niche market of New Jack Swing.

Whether anyone finds this collage of ten to twenty year old musical swatches of any interest remains to be seen. You suspect that Timbaland for instance doesn't have Charlie's number high up his speed dial list. But in more ways than one that's the glorious fantasy of it all. Music both as an industry and art form isn't simply the reservation of the big animals, in fact it's as much a complex ecosystem as any other on functioning between human beings. That Urban Myth is a curio is unarguable. To suggest that it's pointless ridicules everybody who has a dream but chooses to exist outside of the world of Simon Cowell and his talent show nothingness.