Days of Plague & Vice, the debut Hip-Hop album from the UK's J Kovacs (on Twelve Labours), is the verbally dexterous ramblings of an emcee lost in the grimy fairground world of modern life - Inhabited by pale commuters, fallen Angels, and lost Daemons, living amongst the infernal turnings of giant machines. Lyrically an incredible piece of work. Grime-esque New Orleans tracks, and apocalyptic love songs, share the 54 minutes of dense and dirty, wordy rants, at the screwed up world Kovacs inhabits. Choruses soak out of the sparser tracks adding crusty melodies and chanted hooks to the layered beats, whilst others drop you into a burning eco-sphere where Kovacs stands alone lamenting loves-lost. Musically, Kovacs' production is a tapestry of acoustic samples, live guitar, home-made percussion and traces of jazz, metal, blues, and funk - brought alive by the mixing skills of Germany's Peter Muller. Scrambled library rarities and badly analogue-...