ADAM F - DRUM & BASS WARFARE

Review by Lily Moayeri for GrooveRadio.com:

Adam F

Drum ‘n’ Bass Warfare

Kaos/System Recordings

Release date: March 11, 2003



After stunning both hip hop and drum ‘n’ bass audiences with his namedropping album Kaos: Anti-Acoustic Warfare, which boasted the rhymes of Redman, LL Cool J, Capone and Noriega, MOP, Pharoahe Monch, Guru, to mention a few, Adam F commissions an all drum ‘n’ bass version of that album in Drum ‘n’ Bass Warfare. Featuring reworks by Roni Size, Dillinja, )EIB(,J Majik, Matrix and Fierce, among others. The remixers try their best to do the lauded original justice. Showing that hip hop and drum ‘n’ bass elements can co-exist easily, the mixes are fluid while hard-hitting. Remolding the hip hop versions smoothly into totally natural drum ‘n’ bass creations, these numbers work so well they could have been drum ‘n’ bass ones to begin with.



Review by Matt Cibula for Music-Critic.com

A Great Party We Weren't Really Invited to Do



A few years ago, drum'n'bass artist Adam F decided that d'n'b wasn't all he wanted to do-he saw himself as a hip-hop producer too. This could have ended in tragedy, but it didn't: he worked his ass off and ended up knobbing on a few different cuts, including L.L. Cool J's "The Greatest of All Time" off the G.O.A.T. album. He then decided to go batshit and release his own hip-hop record, called KAOS, featuring that LL cut and a bunch of high-profile guests; that record, unsurprisingly, killed.



Okay, listen close now: this two-disc release features drum'n'bass remixes of Adam F's hip-hop tracks from KAOS. And none of these remixes are actually BY Adam F, and the second disc is a mix featuring tracks from the first disc. Got that? But the stuff's hot, dude, real hot on the real, and it will definitely fill up your car or apartment or Discman with some amazing sounds that will spin your head like Linda Blair.



All this stuff is cutting-edge, as far as d'n'b remixes of two-year-old hip-hop tracks can be. The track "Smash Sumthin'," which featured Redman in full-on crazy street preacher mode, pops up a couple of times: the Roni Size remix is all aggromath techno, while the Bad Company UK mix buries Redman a little and instead goes for speed and precision. "The Greatest of All Time" is also doubled-I think the sly Ray Keith mix is better than the Back2Basics straight-on version, but they're separated by a whole bunch of tracks so that they both sound great.



But overall these songs just make you feel stupid for not having heard the original record. Unless you're well-schooled in KAOS, you won't appreciate the transformation of those tracks to these ones. It's like hearing about a party that you weren't invited to, and it ends up getting to you after a while. Whether you love this stuff or are just kinda "yeah" about it depends on how much you care about stuff like that.