He has just dropped his 4th studio album entitled ‘
Tongue N Cheek’, and has already been labeled as his best work yet, but can it really compete with the likes of ‘Boy in Da Corner’, ‘Showtime’ and ‘Math’s and English’? Well, if the pre-release tracks are anything to go by, yes, yes it can!
The first track on the album playlist to drop into the charts was the massively commercial chart tune he penned alongside Calvin Harris called ‘Dance Wiv Me’. ‘Dance Wiv Me’ offered us more than just the Dizzee Rascal we had grown to love on the other 3 albums, it offered a super commercial, flexible, dumbed down Dizzee who knew that he had 2 sets of fans too please, the undergrounders, who are as loyal to him as ever, and the main streamers, two very different audiences. ‘Dance Wiv Me’ gave Dizzee the platform to really launch Tongue N Cheek, as it was instantly taken notice of as an album in the making. That said, the collaboration with one of the hottest producers around at the moment definitely had something to do with the success of this first track.
The second track to break on ‘
Tongue N Cheek’ was the one. ‘Bonkers’ was Dizzee’s party tune. This was the song of a million summers this year and I’m pretty sure if you were on a cruise ship in the middle of the Med you would still have been able to hear the party islands banging out the heavy bassline of ‘Bonkers’. With it’s catchy lyrics and super grimey bass drop it was a sure fire winner to get Dizzee’s underground following behind this album to an amazing extent. At this stage Dizzee was flying, 2 hit tracks under his belt and the album was yet to drop. Then ‘Holiday’ happened and things just got a whole lot better!
The third and final pre-release before the official album launch is a track entitled ‘Holiday’. If you haven’t heard Holiday, it’s actually really easy to imagine. All you have to do is combine the first joint, ‘Dance Wiv Me’, with the second release, ‘Bonkers’, and what you end up with is a track that pleases everybody on so many levels. ‘Holiday’, another tracked successfully and masterfully produced by the man they call Calvin Harris, is an awesome mix of a cheesy party tune, that you would expect a band such as 5ive to release, and a tune that wouldn’t be out of place in the deepest, darkest clubs of Ibiza. Ok, the lyrics are probably some of the worst Dizzee has ever written, but the way the tune turns into a monumental club house/trance track is undeniably one of the master strokes of Dizzee’s career and is guaranteed to set dance floors across the globe on fire.
With 11 tracks in total ‘Tongue N Cheek’ makes for a quality album with some high end production running through it. Other tracks to watch out for include the mighty ‘Dirtee Cash’, which heavily samples the original tune ‘Dirty Cash’ by Stevie V from back in the 1990’s and Road Rage which takes us right back to Dizzee’s Playstation 2 production grime sound from 4 years back.
