Quakers - Quakers

Listening to early cuts from Quakers in isolation was an exhilarating experience - the thunderous brass of ‘Fitter Happier’ and slick guitar lick of ‘Smoke’ supporting the relentless flows of Guilty Simpson and Jonwayne respectively, two screaming jugganauts which whetted plenty of appetites for devouring the full length in its entirety. Then listeners discovered that these songs were part of an album which was forty one tracks long - a project undertaken by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow which quite frankly sounded as intimidating as it did enticing. Intimidating on paper, that is. What Quakers actually sounds like, as it turns out, is an undeniably exciting hip hop record, and although nothing surpasses the tightly coiled quality of those early cuts, nothing during its marathon seventy-plus minutes lowers the bar by much either.

Quakers works best when it moves with the swift momentum of a relay race - guest vocalists spitting their verse in two minutes or less before passing the baton onto the next MC with the relentless pace of a hyper-extended freestyle. The first dozen or so tracks manage this beautifully, moving from chirpy brass and sexual imagery to grimy urban soundscapes and anti-authoritarian sentiment to dreamy synths and old school word play with flair and style - a couple of minutes each, rushing past with no opportunity to wear thin, seguing into the next texture and style with the proficiency you’d expect from the team behind the desk. And even though you’ve been invited to do so on pretty much every track, Frank Nitty’s suggestion to “turn it up” at the beginning of ‘Dark City Lights’ is still a persuasive one, the staccato throbs of rhythm and laser-beam synths delivering one of the album’s most adrenaline soaked peaks. And at eighteen tracks in, you’re not even halfway through.

There’s no getting away from the fact that Quakers feels long, because it is long. And no matter how streamlined and truncated most of them are, forty one tracks is always going to feel like forty one tracks. But putting that obvious observation to one side, it’s impressive to recognise how successfully Quakers manages to hold attention across its seventy-plus minutes, never wading through identifiably dull stretches, nor any of the individual tracks being duds of any description. Inevitably, as the album moves past its halfway point at track twenty (forgive all the maths in this review, but there’s definitely some double-take stats to be drawn from this thing) arresting breaks from the established blueprint become increasingly welcome, such as the bizarre vocal tones and pitch bending of a guest like Deed, or the smoky trip-hop piano of closer ‘Oh Goodness’.

But the old-school craftsmanship of the rich brass samples and crackling beats (complimented, of course, with the comforting hiss of the vinyl they plundered it all from) bolsters the strength of even the most safely played verses on here, meaning that while Quakers never quite regains its momentum to the point of upgrading its final movements from a home stretch to a victory lap, it nevertheless remains far more digestible and entertaining than any thirty-five guest vocalist, forty-one track, seventy-plus minute hip-hop monolith might ever reasonably be expected to be. Transcending its likelier fate as a mere curiosity piece or stats-factory for press release writers, Quakers stands tall as a record to be cherished in practice, rather than just admired in theory.