Text: Dai Man

The great thing about the new Black Eyed Peas’ album The Energy Never Dies (The E.N.D) is that it sounds as if it was recorded more for DJs in mind than for the radio. There’s a new aural wash over the band’s sound. It’s future funk with slammin’ lo fi credentials. The beats carry much more weight than the lyrics, with Fergie more computer-generated backing singer, her voice vocoded to maximum effect adds to a metallic sheen that hints to dance floors of the mid-21st Century. The songs are boisterous, now generation rants about the choice of youth to consume, or not and the effects that this unrealised power holds, where we’re Rockin’ to the Beat in our Electric City where we Party All The Time. The Peas have never quite won me over before, their brand of hip hop party never quite exciting me up off my bar stool and into the middle of the floor to shake my thing. The E.N.D however is deeper, darker and with Fergie now a bona fide female computer generated avatar, it’s the sexiest they’ve sounded. The bonus CD, not reviewed here but currently available, mixes some of the band’s more familiar tracks with this dirty new Peas sound and is possibly the best remix bonus CD I’ve heard in a long time. The E.N.D is a great and welcome surprise.