Ghetto Dictionary: The Mystery : Bounty Killer : Review : Rolling Stone

British drum-and-bass owes a lot to dance-hall music, but judging from one of Bounty Killer's new tracks, "Liberty," which is driven by a squelchy and sinister synthetic bass line, Jamaica has taken it all back. Both The Mystery and The Art of War are rife with all the woofer-tearing sonic terrorism that used to make jungle so exciting. But that wouldn't matter if Bounty (real name: Rodney Basil Price) didn't have a voice that can shape-shift like a special-fx alien, often leaping up from a subsonic boom to a fiendish cackle in less than a second. On "Supastarz," Bounty Killer drops his thick patois and crows about hanging out in the bar with J. Lo, then explains, "Girls like the finer things, wedding bells and diamond rings/Girls like the jing-a-lings, so they like me." It might be misleading to call his voice a thing of beauty, though, because when he's rhyming and booming on a tune like "W.A.R.R," over bass riffs so pummeling they could be electrocuted steel drums, Bounty Killer sounds like nothing if not a fearsome, and funky, prophet of doom.

PAT BLASHILL
(RS 898 - June 20, 2002)