'Run For The Hills' ft. Ed Strong & King Kaiow - Prose (free download)

More music relating to The IRS: 'Run For The Hills' by Prose featuring Ed Strong and King Kaiow of The IRS. This is a free download in order to drum up business for their forthcoming album 'Force Of Habit' with music and artwork this good best believe Prose are going to be a name you hear a little more.

If you haven't already heard their name then get digging backwards on that there Bandcamp page. They've really got their back catalogue on over there so you can go stream or download some classic-sounding boom bap UK Hip Hop in order to familiarise yourself with these boys. Can you hear the jungle drums?

'There It Is' - The IRS (free download)

Whoa! Just found out that UK Hip Hop group The IRS are giving away their album 'The World Is Theirs' as a free download on Bandcamp! How good is that?

You should download and particularly look out for these tracks: 'Windy Weather' , 'Day With The Devil' and 'Big Day In' - you'll like 'em.

Whilst you're there grab yourself the download of 'There It Is' taken from their forthcoming release 'The IRS Presents: Offcuts'.

This is all in preparation for the release of 'The IRS Presents: Speaks Volumes' LP which is due out in January 2011. They say "the 2nd LP is much more polished than our first LP but features the same style of raw and thoughtful lyricism. It features production from in-house producer Ed Strong, as well as guest spots from Beat Fanatic’s very own Wizard and also Pete Cannon, both of whom have been making waves with their high quality production. It also features MC guest spots from Stig of the Dump and Skandal. We aim to stream the album online from 25/12/2011 with an official release in all formats early January 2011. In the meantime, enjoy some tasty treats from our Offcuts release."

'More To Life' - The IRS (free download)

From Ed Strong:

"Some of you may of heard that IRS are to stop making music as a group. This is sad news but unfortunately true. We're all still good friends and the split is due to the fact we can't coordinate as a group anymore and don't have the time to compete in today's industry.

We will still be doing shows this year while we put out the rather large sum of music we have stored up for the last 2/3 years. Most of it will be free over the internet but we will also release our album digitally probably in the summer."

Sad news but I'm looking forward to the promised music. You can download this track for free here.

'It Came From Across The Pond - VA (free download)

Supporters of all things UK Hip Hop, the good guys at BMX/Skate/Music/Art mag Style 43 have put together a compilation of UK Hip Hop niceness in collaboration with US based indy Hip Hop site aboveGround.

Peep the tracklist:

1. Sound of a Genius – Jack Flash
2. Strange Fruit – M9ine
3. Aquarius – Mystro
4. Kush115 – Squid Ninjaz
5. The Low – Delusionists
6. Take Time – Truth
7. Ground N Bump (Interlude) – Jon Phonics
8. Some Emcees – The IRS
9. Responsibilities – Farma G
10. Clash of the Titans – Shadowstar ft. Joker Starr
11. Do It For a Fee – DJ IQ ft. Micall Parknsun
12. I’m Doing It – Genesis Elijah
13. Now Look At Us – Revilo
14. Alternate Take – Jon Phonics ft. Verb T & Fliptrix

Suspect Packages Xmas Bashing!

Have a UK Hip Hop Happy Christmas with Suspect Packages!

'East is in the House' - VA - 456 (free download)

Pitching East Coast Hip Hop from the United States against British soundalikes 456 has created a gritty mix worth bumping on whichever side of the Atlantic you reside.

M.O.P., Cormega, Fat Lip, Nutrageous, Sha Stimuli and Reks nestle alongside the hardest of current UK tracks from Orphans of Cush, Endemic and Cappo, Iron Braydz, Mr. Flex, Micall Parknsun, Jehst and The IRS.

This free download has a purpose - to prepare you for forthcoming music from 456!

Here at Certified Banger we have another taster from 456 and Chosen Spokesmen MC Mr. Flex (who featured on volumes 4 and 5 of 'On The Radar'). The track is called 'Dark Days' and whilst the original production was done by Risk (also a featured artist on 'On The Radar Vol. 5'), 456 has had a go at remixing it - see what you think (click to download the remix and click here to download the original).

Phoenix Da Icefire Launch Party Next Monday

When: Monday, December 7, 2009
Time: 7:00pm - 9:30pm
Where: 55 NEAL STREET, LONDON, COVENT, WC2H 9LL

Carhartt is hosting a special one off event at its Neal Street store in Covent Garden, London.

Alongside an exclusive performance from the man himself Phoenix Da Icefire will be: Triple Darkness and The IRS plus extra special guests Cappo & Endemic - performing tracks from their 'Needle Drop' E.P! Charlee Brown and ('On The Radar Vol. 5' artist) DJ Roast will spin and Kingpin will host.

** Free Drinks will be provided by Mean Time Brewery **

Skandal Launch Party Tonight!

This sounds like a good do - get down and support!

Today's UK Hip Hop Free Stuff - Sway, Diversion Tactics, Percy Filth and more

There's decent music and stuff coming at me from all directions so here's another one of those posts where you can download a few unrelated tracks:

Just got Sway's version of 'Run This Town' - the Jay-Z track that most MCs are now riding. Sway does as well as you'd expect him to. In other Sway/Jay-Z news here's Sway chatting about Al Shux, Sway's boy who produced 'Little Derek', 'Products', 'Back 4 U' and 'Saturday Night Hustle', who has just produced 'Empire State Of Mind' on Jay-Z's 'Blueprint 3'. Oh, and here's the behind the scenes video for his latest single 'Mercedes Benz'.

Ed Strong of the almighty and underrated IRS crew sent me a new track from them this morning. It's called 'Cold City', it's produced by Wizard and is a return to form for the boys - it's got me reaching for their 2007 album 'The World Is Theirs'. Check the interview I did with them back then. Look out for a mixtape soon.

I can also point you towards some free clean downloads of Diversion Tactics forthcoming 12" single. 'Can't Swim' is produced by Zygote and Jazz T and 'Back To School' is produced by J-Zone! Both tracks are beasts and great examples of proper entertaining Hip Hop - watch how you relate to 'Back To School'!

I also picked up this track by Mr. Jinx over at his bandcamp page via the UKHH forum. The track is called 'Ha Ha Ha' and Mr. Jinx appears to be Scotlandish and may possibly be on Scotland Yard Recordings. Also, here's one of those youtube video things for his track 'It's Coming'.

You've probably heard this by now but Percy Filth dropped this little freebie of a beat on Twitter and I'm really feeling it so here it is: 'At The End Of The Day' - could by many a footballer's theme song.

Organix have dropped part 5 of their series and this time the topic is bad experiences and it features Mal, Scrabble, Dweller, Pez, Diligent, Fingers, T.A.D and Trick.

Here's a track by 'On The Radar' artist, Miss Tofelees. It's called 'Move', it features Kats, Domer and Ryan O'neil and is going to be on 'Almost Fameless Mixtape Vol.4', which will be released September 27th, as well as the Almost Fameless Mixtape UK Edition, which will feature a few previously released and unreleased tracks by Miss Tofelees and Jone$y including collaborations with several UK emcees (some of whom I've featured on Certified Banger) and other UK producers.

Lastly, here's a few tracks from newcomer Naturekid. You've got 'I Like Getting High', which is what it sounds like it is, (can anyone tell me which other song shares the sample?) there's 'Coolin'' which is actually by singer Terrence Mas featuring Naturekid and there's 'Bring Me Down' which features a bloke apparently called Crazy. See what you think peepholes.

UK Flow Documentary

'UK Flow' is a short documentary film about UK Hip Hop. It features The I.R.S. boys, Orifice Vulgatron, Stig of the Dump, Disorda and many more prominent UKHH heads. It's edited and shot really well and is very representative of the real scene here. It's by Mike Tyler and Lee Warren and this is what they say about it: "This is a short taster for a feature-length version, which will follow the story of several artists ... and key players in the scene. This film gives an idea of the tone of the project."

The IRS & Precise Da Analyzer Freestyles (video)

Here's King Kaiow, Ed Strong, Random DV of The IRS 'longside Precise Da Analyzer spittin' pre-writtens ahead of a show:

Vote The IRS for the Indy Awards!

Click on this link and take a minute to vote for the guys, they were the only Hip Hop act I saw on the list so if you are reading this, take a minute from your busy schedule to give these hard working lads the boost they deserve! I've voted (on all my different email accounts!)

Vote The IRS for the Indy Awards

The IRS interview, Friday 7th December 2007, Atrium Leeds

Can you tell me who we’ve got here first?
Ed Strong: Big Ed Strong. Big Producer, big MC, big producer, IRS family.
King Kaiow: Big King Kaio…or bigger King Kaiow and like I always say; I only need to MC and I’ll eclipse everything else that anyone else just said before me!
Superb: It’s Superb, butter with words, stuttering nerd, I heard I recite something like nuttin you ever heard, here with The IRS crew and my boy…Guide One.
Guide One: You stole my thunder man. DJ Guide One, brother of MC DV who’s not here today.

How did you get together as a group?
KK: Basically from the very grassroots level it was me and D and my other boy started a little thing called AMS. Then I left my college and went to another college and that’s where I bumped into this miscreant…
GO: DJ Guide One!
KK:…and his brother DV and then we started chatting and he was like ‘oh there’s this boy called Ed, he’s a DJ as well’ and I was like ‘Ah I met him…when he was skateboarding one time’ so we all met up and started making tracks and it just grew from there.
S: There was a lot more of us then. There were about ten of us.
KK: Yeah, you lose the deadweight.
ES: Yeah, lose the deadweight and get on with the serious people. You can write that, they know it.

Ed, you're in education as a job yeah?
ES: I was in education but I quit. I was a software trainer in a secondary school in South East London. I’ve just got a new job, doing the same sort of thing in tertiary education with people doing BTEC’s and that kind of thing. Education’s my career, man.

I’m a teacher too.
ES: Good, good. Help the yout’ them. (sings) ‘Teach the yout’ them, to survive, every time’.

You know that Rodney P track? The Future? That’s why I’m in education.
ES: Yeah I know what you’re talking about man. To be honest, from a Hip Hop point of view, working in education, it pisses me off hearing a lot of artists saying ‘What about the Kids?’ and I’m like ‘What are you doing for the kids?’. It’s a horrible thing, man. Understanding the kids is part of being a good…
KK: I’m one of those MC’s!
ES: That’s why I hate you!
KK: To be fair, my mum was a foster carer so I have done something for the kids. I’ve helped more kids than a lot of people have... I’d just like to say that.

I find it annoying when you hear these rappers saying the schools are instilling bad morals in the kids ‘cause I’m not.
ES: You’re talking to them kind of people: ‘I work in a school’ and they’re like ‘ah you work for the man; you’re evil’. And what do they do? They sign on and get their JSA every two weeks and they blatantly pimp off the system. They don’t do anything for their community. There’s a lot of good hearts in education, it’s the people at the top who mess it up.
GO: At least you’re putting into the system instead of taking from it.

That was a bit of an aside but…
ES: I like them kinda questions.

How would you describe your sound overall?
GO: What we talk about, what we think about from day to day. You know, the funny stuff, the deep stuff. The album is almost like, if you sit in a room with us for one day and listened to what we were talking about, that’s what the album is like.
KK: I’ve got one word for us…Greatness…hahahaha.
ES: Nah that’s it like…we don’t wanna say, yeah it’s real hip hop but at the end of the day it’s us. People that know us say ‘Yeah, I listened to your album. That is you lot as a sound’.
KK: I’ve gotta say…Anyone who’s literally just putting a real version of their life on record, I can appreciate that. Whether you’re a bum and you don’t earn anything and you talk about that or whether you make money and you talk about that…I can listen to that. If you’re 50 Cent yeah? You’re earning that money for real, I don’t rate him for talking about guns that much, but when he’s talking about money; that’s his life! That’s what he’s around and he’ll say it in a comical way. But when people talk about money when they aint got money or they talking about guns when they aint using guns or they talking about drugs and they aint selling drugs then that’s stupid. But if you’re talking about it and you’re doing it then that’s real innit?
GO: That’s why when you’re listening to the album you might hear contradictions. You might hear us saying one thing on one track and someone else saying something on another track that kinda contradicts that but that’s what people are like, no-one’s perfect.

I was talking to someone today about what success is in Hip Hop. In the USA you’ve got success as being big earnings, big money. But in the UK, no-one gets big money for being in hip hop. It seems to me success is having your name on peoples lips. What’s your view on that?
KK: It’s good to have your name on people’s lips; we haven’t had a bad thing said about our album but at the same time it doesn’t put food in your mouth. Until British Hip Hop gets to a point where you can sell and be self sufficient off it, you’re not gonna get the best out of it. You can’t make the best possible hip hop if that’s not your life. At the same time it gives us more life experience. A lot of people make it and they’re not sampling real life because they’re separated from where they came from. That’s why British hip hop is at its real level because people are still living what they are saying rather than in a retrospective way.
ES: I aint gonna mention no names but I know for a fact that one of the biggest acts in urban music in this country…not N Dubz or Dizzee, we wont mention his name. All I know is I know a person that works at his record label and my man is in tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt and he’s got people screaming and shouting at his shows. What is success? I’ve put my album out and I’ve got mans coming up to me saying ‘IRS, you lot are sick’. My man’s got 15 year old girls he can’t even bang and tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt so what is success really? I’m not mentioning his name…
S: It’s Kano innit?!
ES: Nah, nah I’m just saying man…The thing is over here, what’s messed it all up is the internet. When we were growing up to get that Wu album you had to cop it off your boy which would take 90 minutes cos you had to record it onto a tape or you had to pay for it yourself. Nowadays 16 year olds can just download albums whenever they want and they’re spoilt for choice. If someone’s talking about shooting guns, they’re gonna want to buy it rather than us talking about what’s going on in a grown man’s situation. Success is hard to measure.

On the internet thing…don’t you think those 16 year olds downloading that stuff wouldn’t actually be the people buying it anyway. When I was 16 I wasn’t buying all the stuff I wanted. Are they actually taking any money out of it?
GO: I see what you mean. If you are putting out stuff on the internet then you’re reaching people who you wouldn’t reach other wise but I think at the same time you still do lose people who would have bought it. At the end of the day we want people to hear our music.
ES: At the end of the day, if you’re an artist, your career as a music musician is to make money off of live shows and selling records. That’s the truth innit. No-one in the UK sells records.
KK: No, no, no…Spice Girls!
ES: UK Hip Hop. No-one in UK Hip Hop sells records. But success is another thing…as long as nothing bad is said about us then I think we’re successful.

Would you prefer to be in this scene than the US scene?
ES: You know what? I’d rather be making hard house and earning ten grand per beat, as a producer…but I don’t like hard house, I can’t get down to it. That’s the thing, I love Hip Hop.

Have you got anything else to say? Any funny stories?
KK: Yeah, IRS are great. We’re great!
GO: I’ve got a funny story…Kaiow was asleep in the car most of the way here with the biggest dribble dribbling down the left corner of his mouth.
ES: And he farted.
GO: He farted in his sleep. What have you got to say? What’s your defence?
S: My defence is: I’m dirty and I like it.
ES: When’s this going out?

Soon as I can listen to it and write it out!
ES: We got a show on Friday, Friday the 14th of December in Brighton. Beer and Rap with Task Force, Dirty Diggers, Mystro…Mystro’s album launch party, check out Mystro. Then on the 21st we got a gig in Guildford; Platform 9. Big up everyone. Big up DV who couldn’t be here, DV’s a laugh, he woulda argued all the way with me but this time I got to talk all the way through. Thanks for having us man. Big up Leeds every time.
All: Brap Brap!

These tracks are available from their myspace page:

Keep Focus

Work

Find Me a Pen

Lola

The World is Almost Theirs - album promo mixtape

The IRS - The World is Theirs

If you like Hip Hop that really has something to say and is thought provoking and you haven't yet checked out The IRS then there is possibly a small compartment in your life which feels empty. If you like Roots Manuva but never really knew what he was on about but still loved his sound then you need to hear this. If you like Hip Hop with beats that are slightly leftfield, but not so much at that they aren't Hip Hop any more then get yourself a copy of 'The World Is Theirs' by London crew The IRS, out now on Merciless Records.

With a thought provoking variety of topics including laziness, the devil's negative impact on life, parenting, the love of money and hard times, your brain is well catered for. But so is your sense of humour. Droll observations, sarcasm and irony make light work of the heavy themes. The beats compliment the witty but serious lyrics. Ed Strong has carefully selected samples that provide The IRS with 'a sound' despite the differing genres that have been plundered - there is definitely something to be said for in-house producers.

Check out their video for 'Day with the devil'. It's a complementary-to-the-track stop-motion job with a message that can be quite powerful when listened to with the right frame of mind:

"Spent a day with Devil, saw him play, saw him fiddle//With our lives, realised all the ways that he meddles//He told me greed was, one of his greatest achievments//It's man's greatest weakness and the reason for most bereavements"

If you around the Leeds way on the 7th of December at 10pm then you can get yourself up to the Atrium to get down with The IRS for only a fiver. That's a bargain.

The IRS - Big Day In
The IRS - Windy Weathermen