Next, a teenage grime MC and former mayoral candidate reteams with equally rising producer…

[Video][Website]
[6.33]

Micha Cavaseno: Jack “Mumdance” Adams has been one of those semi-obscure dance figures in grime for a minute or two, who’s finally had his own comeuppance with the umpteenth GRIME REVIVAL. Last year, he and young up and coming MC Novelist, a young man with the best nerdy name in grime and the greatest grime song about fast food since JME’s “Food”, struck gold on XL with their amorphous and gruesome “Take Time”. Their follow up, however, is a bit too many ideas in one on the part of Jack (the crunch mutation of those Jammer/Dizzee-reminiscent FX don’t pair well with those sudden trancey synth streaks), and a sudden case of writer’s block from N-O-V.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Serviceable garage throwback, complete with angry hornet sounds. Reminds me when the eighties revival began in 1993.
[4]

Megan Harrington: Grime has aged so well because new technology remains a source of enormous suspicion. “Shook” throbs with electrocution, buzzes with the invention of misuse. Novelist crawls through this plugged in wasteland as King Shit, denying wifey status and taunting “are you afraid, sir?” At the dawn of the Internet era, grime simply mirrored our newfound reliance on the ether. Now the genre’s erstwhile darkness sounds prescient, as though these producers always knew our naïveté and narcissism would come back to kill us. Mumdance orchestrate a dissonant symphony, and by the end I am a little afraid. 
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: Marvelously atmospheric, spare, minimalist grime, with occasional keyboard swells reminiscent of the opening of (of all things) Madonna’s “Deeper and Deeper.” Novelist is a superb MC. This is fairly vital.
[7]

Crystal Leww: I dig the starts and stops of the beat and how the track moves, especially in those moments of synth wash, but this never quite moves beyond mildly amusing. Novelist puffs his chest out as hard as he can, but this lacks a real conviction that makes a rapper compelling.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Novelist throws a staggering amount of jabs with the occasional cross tossed in: starting a line after a beat, or the line “when I’m on the mic they say I’m the top guy”. Mumdance works up splashes and a flat razzing bassline. He stitches these stretches to one-chord synthwalls: it’s not brazen, but it’s refreshing.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: I don’t know which I’m more pleased with: how this sounds in places (perhaps I’m imagining it) like the past year of UK dance interzone sounds blowtorched, file-corrupted and re-magnetized to their last bits of familiarity, or how “Mumdance” is an actual artist name and not a wacky critic portmanteau for sepia EDM-folk.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I love this: those grotesque noises somewhere between arcade gunfire and biological squelching, the down-powered Commodore nostalgia in other places, how the lack of variation in the flow only adds to the severity of something that should be a mess but isn’t.
[9]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Nasty, nasty, nasty. Sounds like an oil spill or a slow-motion industrial malfunction, with enough space for rave scene spirituality to waft in on the back a few keys… And proceed again with the nastiness. The bridge eventually comes in about a minute and half in, and when the low-end percussion kicks in, the discombobulating waves are well worth surfing. Bar-wise, it’ll do (kanye_shrug.gif) but truth be told, you should be salivating at the thought of your favourite taking an F64 to this beat. It’s out there now: may the nastiest MC win.
[6]