After a more than three year wait, the next instalment of the Mushroom Jazz series has just landed. I've loved the MJ series since the first time I heard it and it's probably my most significant musical influence of the last half-decade. I am also a big fan of Mark himself, as amongst other things, he was responsible for pushing my first house record into the public eye and getting it signed to Greenhouse. That's why it is so hard to say this:After about three listenings, I think MJ6 is probably the weakest of all the official releases.
Admittedly, after the unbelievable zip-locked freshness of MJ3, MJ4, and MJ5, the bar was set stupidly high for the next instalment. Think Godfather Part III. With older brothers like I & II, you're born knowing that you're going to look like a pants-wetting club-footed retard by comparison.
MJ6 marks a return to the heavily jazz-sample-based sounds of the original MJ, that 90s acid-jazz sound that you can hear on just about all the unofficial MJ tapes. If you are still feeling that sound, then you'll find a lot to like here, but if you liked the moodier direction that the MJ series had been heading in, then prepare for a slap in the face-hole and a poke in the nads; gone are the hard-hitting yet soulful sounds of Pete Rock's A Love Thing, Nicolay's Nic's Groove, Gripper's Jazz Cop, stuff from The Strange Fruit Project, DJ Spinna, Bahamadia, etc etc ... i.e. stuff that I like to steal for my own glory.
MJ6 has a much happier and more harmless sound; looped-up piano samples that hark back to the MPC-is-god era of production, the kind of stuff that would be great as background tunes whilst knocking back Coronas on a Sunday arvo, but nothing that's really gonna have you breaking your neck or taking the time to write a know-it-all wankfest of a blog post about it.
Looking at the tracklist, part of the problem might be that it looks like a big majority of the tunes are Om records. Obviously, it will probably help them sell more records, but the old "variety is the spice-rack of life" rule seems to have been forgotten. If you can't reach out to BBE for a couple tracks, then you are Cheney'ing yourself in the foot.
Having said all that, it's still beats out 90% of the dog balls on the shelves today for your hard-earned food stamps, so go check it out, and if you haven't heard the earlier records in the series, then get ready for the best history lesson you'll ever have ...
