El-P - Fandam Plus

Never one to miss a trick, hip hop's leading avant-savant and anti-corporate entrepreneur El-P here recycles his outstanding Fantastic Damage as an instrumental LP.

If the original sounded forbidding, Fandam Plus is even muzzier, with the humanising raps peeled away to reveal layer after layer of rough-cut samples, spluttering beats, deviant synths and indeterminate threats. Hardly essential, unless your karaoke sessions are unusually intense (the lyrics are included, along with remixes and videos, on a second disc). But still the best hip hop dub excursion since Dr Octagon's The Instrumentalyst in 1996.

Rating: 3 / 10