Research Ill Manors track and soundtrack album

Ill Manors Track & Soundtrack Album

Release Date: July 23, 2012
Duration of Album: 46:04

Genre: Rap   Stage & Screen

Styles: British Rap   Soundtracks

Album Moods:
Stylish   Dramatic   Exciting   Gutsy   Rousing   Street-Smart  Yearning   Energetic  Gritty   Provocative   Searching   Uncompromising   Unsettling   Wry   Dark

Themes:
Politics/Society   Youth   World View   City Life

Label: Warner Bros.

Producer: Plan B, Al Shux, Eric Appapoulay,David McEwan, 16bit, Labrinth,Saul Milton

Recorded: 2011–2012
The Sanctuary
(London, UK)
Edge Recording Studio
(Alderley Edge, UK)

In March 2012 he released the single and video for "Ill Manors", a song (containing a sample from Peter Fox's "Alles Neu") which deals with the 2011 London Riots. A soundtrack album and film of the same name (Drew's first as both writer and director) were released in June 2012, followed by three more singles: "Lost My Way", "Deepest Shame" and "Playing with Fire". The album sold over 500,000 copies.Plan B's soundtrack album became his second number one album.

Ill Manors, the soundtrack, is a thematically sound album with the dour life of the U.K.'s lower-class youth always in focus. Their dreams, hopes, victories, and inevitable defeats fuel these songs, all of it tied together by dialogue from the film along with spoken word from performance poet John Cooper Clarke, his dark humour making him the album's wise and wise-cracking "Watcher." Like Drew's leap into the director's chair, it's an ambitious move, but any thought that he's in over his hoodie is wiped away quickly by the opening title track, which invites "Let's all go on an urban safari/We might see some illegal migrants" as cellos and dirty beats lay underneath, because this is not only a full-bodied, string-instrument soundtrack, but a grimy soundtrack too. Drew's writings are simpler and more earnest than previously. Hearing about kids who don't make it to their teens or parents who are doomed to inflict their pain on the next generation in such raw and certain terms is designed to snap listeners out of their jaded mindset, and it works, especially when surrounded by music that is either rich and seductive or immediate and flashy. 

The Guardians review response

"It's impressive, but pretty harrowing too"

"It's a bullish defence of a bullish musical and lyrical shift, not so much a reinvention as a reiteration."

"the first great mainstream protest song in years"

"You can applaud what Drew has done while wondering who is really going to enjoy it" 

"a harrowing ride"

"It's still relentlessly grim"