Dälek make post apocalypse music, crumbling building blocks standing like crooked broken teeth, noxious sludge oozing from drain pipes, scorched asphalt and concrete melted into piles of slag. DJ Oktopus creates this heaving nightmare, pulling and fucking with sounds until they sound like they sound. A tinny drum machine is usually sitting in the middle, dwarfed by all this, whirring away on a back-up generator with mechanical indifference. MC dälek weaves together words about humanity, the congealing of people into cities and how people evolve in such conditions, de-sensitized to violence and their own oppressed state, not being able to see the bigger picture for all the concrete. He operates in the vein of KRS One (who is name-dropped a couple times), as someone who is wiser and clearer of sight than anyone else, almost completely focussed on African-American betterment, and Anarchist political beliefs.Basically the idea is man’s environment shapes him internally and informs his actions, ‘Street Diction’ looks at the cold hard truths of the inner city, ‘Evolve from high bred intellectuals who slept on park bench/Topple you off pedestal,/Thrive at any level”¦ Son of concrete given birth and death on same street./We got no time to weep”¦ struggle ain't made for the timid./In these Bricks one mistake leave you rigid’ man is so disconnected from it’s original beginnings the city is now the belly of creation, ‘Most heads I know never even seen a meadow’, and a different set of environments call for a different set of evolutions. This track is the pinnacle of the album lyrically, a skilful wrapping of it’s theme in interesting and unsettling music, all distended bells and a pinging sound drawn out and truncated at the same time.The brick to the face that is ‘Blessed Are They Who Bash Their Children’s Head Against A Rock’ is another defining track because it sets out the political perspective found throughout. Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Barack Obama’s former minister, who became news during the election run-up when his extreme views were highlighted due to his links with Obama), is sampled seemingly in mid-oratory addressing his congregation with statements like ‘We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye’. It really makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, positively exploding with righteousness. ‘A Collection Of Miserable Thoughts Laced With Wit’ looks more closely at African-American people and their place in American society as a whole, unsurprisingly finding injustice, ‘We sacrificed innocence dealt with daily anxiety/Hoped for future riches/Mangled an already chopped sentence, just to make something ours’ and really that can apply to broader political themes too, such as settling for a centre-left President just because they’re not so extremely right. The track finishes it’s musings on how to change this situation by asking ‘So what now?’. This is answered in steely fashion by ‘Los Macheteros/Spear of A Nation’, which lists a number of terrorist acts committed by South and Central American freedom liberation groups the FALN, and by anti-Apartheid groups from South Africa. ‘2012 (The Pillage)’ imagines a future where revolution and apocalypse are imminent, ‘No sleep for the wicked/Lullabies for the timid/Fuck'em good riddance”¦ Violence ain't senseless/The words said were meant kid.’It’s an exhausting listen in more ways than one, with Dälek’s chest and brow beating, an almost constant downer in the lyrics and the heavy churning sounds. There are some variations musically, like ‘A Collection Of Miserable Thoughts Laced With Wit’ which has a pretty music box, albeit with the smell of ozone permeating, or ‘We Lost Sight’ which is a neat little package of varied percussion, soft swirls, and organ, but these moments are in the extreme minority. I suppose this is what inner city life is like for a lot of people, there’s no escape, no real lasting respite, but hopefully there will always be artists like Dalek, or London Dubstep producer The Bug, creating art that’s exploring this, and perhaps searching for a way forward, or a way out. 70%Dälek on MySpace