Todd Terry

Why is Todd Terry, one of the most famous and well-paid house DJ/producers in the world, making a breakbeat album? There's not a sexy hi-hat, nor a single 120 BPM loop on his disc, and it makes you wonder whether the guy's given up on the very genre he helped innovate? Who knows? Resolutions is a multi-faceted portrait of this jet-setting DJ bringing the sound of urban London back to his native New York. The result is a collection of steely beats and dark bass lines tailored with rhymes MCs Cash Money, Essential and reggae DJ Spragga Benz — unsurprisingly, Benz is the only one with a vibe. There's no doubt that Terry can program at junglist tempos. His sounds are hard and pulsating, but they're also very calculated. It’s almost like the man hung out at raves, studied the beats and came home to prove that he could master the same thing. However, the one thing that he forgot was that both hip-hop and drum & bass, like house, have to have a feeling. It's got to be hard, but it's also got to be funky. Tracks like these don't make you want to dance, just bang your head against a wall. If this is Terry's attempt to get down with the new underground, he should think twice — he sounds better when he's remixing Everything But The Girl.