A Guide To Lazy Habits – Part One (‘Lazy Habits’)
If you got to this post via a self help-oriented Google search, and think you might be in the wrong place, hold on a second. This guide may not help you stop smoking, quit drinking, or persuade you to dump that no-good long term partner who won’t stop cheating on you, but it will improve your quality of life significantly. The Lazy Habits we’re looking at here are a London-based hip-hop band with talent to burn – and here, in the first part of a two-part guide to their world, your ears are going to meet the soundwaves kept captive on their debut album. In Part 2, we’ll be checking out their latest release, a remixed version of Lazy Habits’ eponymous debut featuring a wealth of special guests. Trust me – if slick musicianship and catchy songs are your thing, you’re going to get along very well.
While preparing to review Lazy Habits’ debut, I decided to put this album to the ultimate urban-music quality test. Rather than sitting quietly with headphones on, I kept Lazy Habits in my ears while I spent a day exploring central London – and it passed said ultra-scientific, in-no-way-completely-subjective test with flying colours.
While listening to opening track Processional, Australian geniuses The Cat Empire sprang immediately to mind. The next thing to come to mind, for some reason, was the theme tune to Dad’s Army. Make of that what you will. I hit play while exiting my train at Waterloo station, while crowds of commuters hurried toward the gates – and it felt very fitting. Ashes drifted by while Waterloo’s everyone-for-themselves chaos continued; the lyrics to Surface Dirt fit the lip movements of an irate, wide-waisted salaryman screaming into a smartphone as we descended into the Tube; Even Out‘s stark and uncompromising lines could well have described the lives of several haunted-looking Northern Line passengers; and a smart side-parted Mayfair type bobbed a head bracketed by its own headphones in time to Perfect Sentence‘s hole-ridden grooves.
A later look at the London skyline was perfectly soundtracked by Ghosts, Memory Banks‘ skate-video smoothness, Starting Fires‘ Bond-movie chords, and Fades’ distinctly Cat Empire-esque cocktails-and-concrete vibes. The Road went full-on ’70s-cop-show before unleashing lyrical life lessons visualisable in full 1080p HD; An Interlude broke things up with poignantly short-lived strings; and Bulletin demonstrates a level of supportive love most commonly found in those with a deep respect for life, as earned through hard times and an unquenchable drive to overcome the same. The Drowned World was quickly skipped back to when I saw police cars charging down The Mall; Please People made me stop in the middle of Charing Cross Road to better bathe in vocab overload; and Recessional marked an uplifting day-ending sunset watched from Westminster Bridge.
Closing track Ghosts (Screen and Fallen), finally, soundtracked a particularly moving moment on the train home – soft and melancholy piano playing while, in the background, the PA system notified passengers of a person hit by a train outside another central London station. Lazy Habits‘ final track passed away as my fellow passengers took in the news.
Click here for Part 2, and listen to Lazy Habits in full below.
Links
Lazy Habits on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lazyhabits
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