Although best known for supplying the sample beat for Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines (Don’t Do It),” downtown New Yorkers Liquid Liquid left behind a catalog that deserves as much praise as that seminal rap hit. Like “Sex Machine”-era James Brown, Liquid were determined to melt rhythm down to its purest essence. Unlike the funk showman, however, they stripped away the expected guitar/vocalist relationship, creating instead carefully composed layers of crisp percussion and bass that dominated the foreground while singer Salvatore Principat howled and muttered in an echo-laden distance, seemingly unconcerned about whether or not he was the center of attention.
Liquid Liquid were not pretending to be alternative until they got a better offer. They sacrificed such mundane matters to the beat, and every piece on this compilation proves it.
