DJ Diamond - Flight Muzik Reloaded (2016)

This has to be one of the strongest and strangest juke full-lengths yet to emerge from Chicago, with an austerely psychedelic undertow to its hi-octane ghetto bounce. The darkest, sparsest jams are the first to grab your attention: 'Burn Dat Boy' and 'Horns' are on a choppy grime tip, the latter packing darkside string stabs that remind us of Cooly G's 'Narst'. 'Torture Rack' is brutal and brilliant, beat-'em-up vocal snippets and stanked-out, dissonant synths stretched to breaking point across a low-riding gangster's rhythm, but it hardly prepares us for the sheer evil of 'Wreckage' - a blood-freezingly minimal, dystopian drum-cut that sounds like footwork gone industrial. Unbelievably heavy. But there are numerous flights into more surreal territory too: the arabesque 'Rep Yo Clique''s shakes like it's ready for the souk, while 'Snare Fanfare' and 'I Choose You' have an almost orchestral lilt to 'em, and 'Decoded' adds swooping trance accents to an old-school ghetto-tech chassis. 'Go Hard', meanwhile, has been a massive club anthem for some time now, and sounds as lithe and lunatic as ever here. Flight Muzik really is the freshest, fiercest ghetto transmission we've heard in ages, and massively recommended.