Music

Seeing that their last LP sold a staggering 11 million copies in the US alone – and the single ‘Hey Ya!’ hung around the UK chart for nearly six months – it makes sense that now Hollywood want a slice of these photogenic hip hop dandies. ‘Idlewild’ is a ’30s-set film starring Andre 3000 as a pianist and Big Boi as a nightclub owner in an upmarket black holiday resort. This retro-nuevo soundtrack is, predictably, a bit of a rag-bag: most of its 25 tracks are rubbish skits, clips of movie dialogue and glib jazz pastiches that only dilute the ten or so decent songs.

Unlike the last album, in which Andre’s avant-soul half of the two-CD set (‘The Love Below’) trumped the more orthodox hip hop of Big Boi’s ‘Speakerboxxx’, here things are a little less clear cut, with Big Boi behind half of the best tracks. His aces include the Shuggie Otis-fried ‘N2U’; the psychedelic sitar funk of ‘The Train’; the Kate Bush-goes-glitch soul of ‘In Your Dreams’; and ‘Call The Law’, which sounds like Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy In Love’ reworked as a tribal, Ellingtonian swing stomp.

Andre 3000 doesn’t quite cover himself in glory this time – many of his tracks sound like unfinished laptop doodles – and there appears to be no ‘Rosa Parks’ or ‘Ms Jackson’ or ‘Hey Ya!’ to shift units. But he – helped by his jazz pianist pal Kevin Kendrix – has penned four corkers. There’s the crazy ‘Morris Brown’ which sounds like a Missy Elliott single played live by an Ulster Protestant marching band. There’s ‘Idlewild Blue (Don’tchu Worry ’Bout Me)’, which recalls Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’ performed by a 1920s bluesman. There’s ‘Makes No Sense At All’, an uptempo jazz stomper set to Andre’s munchkin-voiced, sped-up vocals. Best of all might be the closing track ‘A Bad Note’, a nine-minute gothic funk epic which sounds like Keith Jarrett backed by Sonic Youth, mixed by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and voiced by George Clinton as Satan. ‘Idlewild’ won’t sell like its predecessor, but the pair certainly haven’t stopped making insane, eccentric and wonderful music just yet.