Downpour - Do You Remember When It Was All About The Drums Parts I & II (re​-​mastered with bonus track) (2021)

Hood’s Chris Adams summons the ghosts of ’94 under his jungle/breakbeat alias Downpour.

Also known as Bracken for his instrumental hip hop output, Adams serves up his first proper release under the Downpour alias in over 20 years, drawing on scattershot digital self-releases for a definitive overview of his work during the past decade. Extant since the late ‘90s heyday of D&B, Downpour issued a handful of 12”s on Midwest US rave label Drop Beat and Leeds’ 555 Recordings that on the face of it sounded nowt like his better known work with Hood (who also counted Craig Tattersall aka The Humble Bee, and Andrew Johnson aka A New Line (Related) in their number) but which shared a melancholy, polaroid quality with it.

The 11 tracks of ‘Do You Remember When It Was All About The Drums? (Parts I & II)’ now find their feet again in the midst of a jungle revival, coming with classic motifs shaded to the deeper, darker end of that sound, and most successfully in the likes of his hardass breakage in ‘Red Flag,’ the deft smoky chops of the album’s title tune, and splashy breaks recalling Scorn’s Quoit gear in This Sound,’ with a slower variant in the woozy squash of ‘Pressure.’ Takes us right back to raving in West Yorkshire fields and scuzzy warehouses, we tell thee.