Not a ? & the Mysterians sample, nor a sequel to “21 Questions,” if you were wondering…

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Iain Mew: The backing goes vwm-vwm-vwm and buzzes a bit in a functional but not particularly thrilling way, leaving this all about JME’s non-stop flow of bragging and shit-talking. The novelty of understanding all of the parochial punchlines helps to make this instantly appealing to me (Richard Hammond! Teddy Sheringham!), but they are really good punchlines, there’s lots more of those, and even when he is listing the names of people I’ve never heard of he’s still remarkably engaging.
[8]

Kat Stevens: “Stop chatting shit, poo-poo chewer!” = amazing. Also pretty good: Skepta’s NRRRRR-NUUUUR noises, slagging off Jeremy Clarkson, and “nobody likes getting a punch in the face/because when you get punched in the face it hurts“. Well done everybody.
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Jer Fairall: Scattershot, masturbatory verbiage, but the goofball wordplay (“Stop talkin’ shit, poo poo chewer”) soars just as often as it lands with a puzzling thud (“Nobody wants a punch in the face/cause when you get punched in the face it hurts”). “One take!” he boasts at the end, perhaps a bit too impetuously.
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John Seroff: Grime probably never stood a real chance of long-term life stateside. Too much is lost in the translation from English to english; the references are utterly opaque and the touring opportunities are slim even for heavy hitters like Wiley or Dizzy.  More’s the pity for technical specialists like JME.  His driven forty-eight consecutive bars would benefit from some variance of tactics and pace but “96 Fuckries” is still an impressive stunt and surprisingly easy to replay. 
[7]

Brad Shoup: Can you hate on similes if you’re just eliding the key words? Either way, he still drops a few “likes,” nearly as often as he drops neat images. The knotty beat gives one the feeling of lingering in the Donut Secret House, only without any possibility of resolution. Weird to feel this uneasy in the presence of throwback boasting. 
[6]

Alex Ostroff: Of the two Adenuga brothers, I’d previously paid more attention to Skepta, but JME is evidently just as talented. The way he navigates his way through “Bare MCs lie too much/If not then they say ‘like’ too much/Easy peasy similes used frequently really gets on my nervous/Reason JME’s lyrically sick recently I don’t pepper my words,” is mesmerizing. He switches up his flow often enough that it sometimes feels slightly off the beat — but never enough that it totally derails, and he has complete control of what he’s doing. (Plus, as a Canadian who spent a couple of summers watching Top Gear with my best friends from Chicago, the Jeremy Clarkson reference is worth a chuckle at least.)
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