Hungover Thursday Part 2479

I still love record shopping……………

As much as we all love the instancy of downloading, there is still immense satisfaction of finding a record you’ve been looking for for ages in a grubby old record store. I did just that yesterday, to be honest I was just killing time before meeting up with friends but something told me I should go into Music and Video Exchange on Berwick Street and something also told me to look in the Hip-Hop section as I have been doing the last couple of years for this one particular album.
I scanned the relatively small shelf, looking for a white spine and the oh so familiar Island Records rainbow not expecting to find anything and there it was…………………….


New Kingdom – Heavy Load.



I’ve been hunting for this album for years since I sold it in a fit of skint desperation. Had a couple of bids on eBay for copies but the price always went in the region of £20-£30 and I wasn’t going to pay that. Even looked around the p2p sites and could never get more than 1 0r 2 tracks, this proved how rare this album is.
Now I’ve found it I have to share it with you.
If you don’t know anything about New Kingdom you would have been missing out on something awesome. A two-way collaboration between two New Yorkers Nosaj (Jason Backwards!) and Sebastian, their style of Hip-Hop was hard to categorize but it sounded ahead of its time even back then in the mid 90s. They were kind of lumped in with the trip-hop and downbeat groups that were so prevalent of the day but to me it was somewhere in between slow Hip-hop and The Blues. Their songs still stand up now as inventive in the style of music they are lumped in with and it looks like their cult status has made them get back together because there is talk of a reunion happening right now, I for one hope so, it would be great to see them live again-they blow a hole in the roof of The Camden Palace in about 1997 when they played at the legendary(sadly no longer)Indie kiddies disco Feet First, that is still one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen.

For further details and downloads of New Kingdom go here.


In the meantime have this -
New Kingdom - Heavy Load Part One
New Kingdom – Heavy Load Part Two