Send "Wiley " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 In the early days of grime, say around 2002 or 2003, it was easy for Americans, many of us still using dial-up to snag single MP3 transmissions from the London underground, to feel like we'd never be able to keep up. Almost a decade later, it still feels impossible, though for entirely different reasons: Whether we're talking freestyles caught in clubs by cell phones or fully thought-out mixtapes, the brand-newest shit from grime's young turks and old hands is now instantly accessible. Much like the current state of U.S. rap, grime unleashes an avalanche of semi-underground material every month, across all media, ranging from the cruddy to the genius. You can catch a headache just thinking about trying to process everything.No one represents both the promise and perils of this state of affairs better than Wiley, still one of the genre's most distinct voices and crucial producers. Up until 2006, you could listen to the entire recorded output of this grime godfather, from bedroom beat experiments to charting singles that reshaped UK urban music, in just a couple of hours. Now it's arguable that even Wiley can't remember every track he's released in the past half-decade. In 2007, he put out no less than six "best-of" mixtapes, and hasn't slowed down. If anything, since his brief and vexed brush with the UK mainstream in 2008 thanks to the pop-dance undeniablility of "Wearing My Rolex", he's sped up, as if his thwarted dalliance with a major label allowed him to see the futility of releasing one "official" album every few years in a cloud-based world. But Evolve, available through the auspices of real-deal label Big Dada, is clearly being marketed as one of the Wiley releases you should pay closer attention to. And you should. Gone are the sickly sweet R&B choruses from his last LP, Chill Out Zone, a sometimes gorgeous but mostly misguided foray into grime-goes-quiet-storm. From opener "Welcome to Zion", we're clearly in old-school Wiley World, as defined by the chilly synth tones and hand-drum-and-computer-clonk rhythms of his earliest singles like "Igloo" and "Eskimo", albeit with a fresh-for-2012 production upgrade. It's no surprise to learn he's hooked up on a few tracks with Mark Pritchard from Africa Hitech, whose best music similarly brings together twisted quotes from the history of rave and manic polyrhythms that feel conscious of Afro-Cuban tradition and post-human at the same time. In the early days, no other producer had Wiley's strange feel for lurch-and-stagger funk, for a shouldn't-work-but-does kind of syncopation, and it's nice to know he hasn't abandoned his bizarre way with beats in favor of comfortably waist-winding grooves....full text |
| Guardian |
| Wiley has a creative energy not entirely common among his peers, not just in urban music, but in any part of the British music scene. In the past 10 months, he has released three albums, an instrumental collection and, just to keep things interesting, an EP, too. That can mean that not everything he puts out is of the highest quality, but that's hardly the case with this collection. Evolve or Be Extinct covers house, hip-hop, electro, bashment, comic skits and, oh yes, a bit of grime. And while Scar (one of two efforts with Mark Pritchard, a dance producer of similarly prodigious output), I'm Skanking and Boom Blast are the tracks whose hooks dig deepest, every song has something to intrigue. "I'm a weirdo, but I'm not a bipolar," is Wiley's take, and it's true that his magpie energy is compelling partly for its wonkiness. But in his impressions of Guardian readers, or lyrical knockings of the younger generation (the title track cuts off an imagined new-school hater in full flow, to segue into a club sex song), there's genuine humour here – another factor that keeps Wiley a class apart....full text |
| Nme |
| t takes a pretty special type of artist to release 11 zip files of music for free, follow that up with three albums within a year and still pique your interest when a new release crosses the doorstep. But such is the way of Wiley, a man who somehow seems to combine the roles of godfather and joker in the UK’s urban music scene. Part of the interest in any new album is guessing which Wiley is going to turn up. Will it be the cold-as-ice bleeding-edge producer of chilling early grime anthems like ‘Eskimo’? The house-y pop star of ‘Wearing My Rolex’? Or the joker who made tracks like ‘Pies’ – chorus “Who ate all the pies?” – and ‘Boom Boom Da Na’? The answer on ‘Evolve Or Be Extinct’ – his first album since way back in July – is all of them. For those who favour the cutting edge there are tracks like ‘Scar’, produced by Africa Hitech man Mark Pritchard, in which Wiley rides a scampering electro beat that scuttles over the speakers like a mechanical crab. Pop fans will enjoy ‘Boom Blast’, a ‘…Rolex’ in waiting, complete with hairdresser-friendly house beats and an effortless chorus about, well, dancing. And for adherents of Wiley’s less-than-serious moments there is ‘Can I Have A Taxi Please?’, a series of imagined phone calls to taxi companies with Wiley putting on silly voices. Typically Wiley, he sets it to one of the best beats on the album....full text |
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