- Some hybrids are so sleekly done that the sum of their parts can seem irrelevant. There are a lot of things inside this 12-inch's bloodstream: the British bass trio LV are channeling the peppery lope of South African kwaito as well as house, garage, dubstep, and UK funky—the usual referents, in short, but here given striking focus while still seeming freewheeling.
The groove of "Boomslang" is especially nimble. UK funky has a soca feel to it a lot of the time anyway, and that comes through even stronger thanks to the kwaito leanings in the track's percussion. The title phrase's iterations rise and fall right in tandem with the drums' basic pattern: "Boomslang" = boom, snare. Well, almost—the crisp snares syncopate too much for it to be quite that simple. But it's an impressively mnemonic device nevertheless, and the melodic little riff that sounds like it's being played on coconut shells, the balloon-rubbing noises and the occasional vocal interjections put you right at the scene of the event it's meant to soundtrack.
"Boomslang" is less than four minutes long; "Zharp" runs all of 2:28. Yet its underwater dub bass is cut beautifully by sine-wavy synth and smartly filtered vocals (glubbing along with the b-line here, a few feet away in an echoless room there) that announce that this is, indeed, kwaito. So be it, but you won't have to know or care anything about that to get with this.
Tracklist A Boomslang
B Zharp