If Rick Fury seems to think he resembles the violent action hero on the cover of his album Hard target, well there may be lyrics that point that way on the record, but he’s fucking with you. At this stage in his career he has nothing to prove, creatively at any rate. Clearly he hasn’t seen a great deal of commercial success, but after around a dozen albums and a quarter of a century his credentials are on wax. Across all of his releases he combines acrobatic wordplay and pop-culture erudition with a rhythmic ease that sees him bouncing across the beat like a powerball, constantly playing the rhythms of quotidian Tyneside speech off against the syncopations of the beat. If his approach has changed over time it’s only that it’s become less overtly flashy – we all know what he can do now, so he lets his skill lie easy in the cracks between the bars. You think he’s just talking, and then you realise he’s been shaping rhythms with the intricacy of a fusion drummer. He sounds supremely relaxed on Hard target, tossing sincerities and bullshit into the mix so impartially that much of the lyrical humour arises in the listener’s own mental gymnastics trying to pick them apart. There’s nothing aggressively progressive about this record: the beats and the verbal stylings water their roots in the pond of golden-age 90s boom-bap, but this is an essay in exactly how well that kind of hip-hop can be done. For me Rick Fury is as good a rapper as any I’ve heard, however famous, and this record shows him at his peak.
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