★★★★★
I went into "Ill Manors" with the preconception that it was an act of atonement for "The Defamation of Strickland Banks." After hitting big with a fictional drama told through lots soul music and a little bit of rap, it looked like a return to rap's and Ben Drew's stomping grounds. As it turns out, "Ill Manors" is not only that, it also actually trumps its predecessor in that it is accompanied by a feature film of the same name...
- rapreviews.com
2012-11-05
★★★★★
Covering subjects such as stabbing people with biros, anally raping corpses, and having sex with 14-year-olds, behind all the unsavoury imagery on Plan B's 2006 debut album was an outraged moralist, appalled at the inequality and injustice of the world he saw around him, like some kind of be-hoodied Bret Easton Ellis...
- drownedinsound.com
2012-08-06
★★★★★
'Spittle-flecked ambassador from hell': Ben Drew, aka Plan B. A few years back, if you'd laid a bet on a British rapper turning out a film script, the odds would have been on Mike "the Streets" Skinner. With his grasp of dialogue and nuanced take on the vulnerabilities of British geezerdom, Skinner was already writing cinematic vignettes that turned effortlessly into videos. Last year he announced vague plans for "a punchy thriller" set in a hospital...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-07-26
★★★★★
Not since the golden years of Stock, Aitken and Waterman have we lived through a time when pop music has served such a shallow functional role - from 'I Gotta Feeling' pop that's made to uplift, to 'Someone Like You' pop that's made to reminisce, to the all-consuming Guetta Lolpop Mafia and their quest to make us dance. People who keep bleating that there's no anti-Establishment sentiment in the charts any more forget that being political largely prevents you from being pop...
- www.nme.com
2012-07-26
★★★★★
Bleak and unflinching ... Plan B, aka Ben Drew. Photograph: Rex Features On the final track of his third album, Ben Drew offers a message to any of the 1m buyers of its predecessor who find themselves dismayed by its noticeably different follow-up...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-07-26
★★★★★
During the promotion for his million-selling The Defamation of Strickland Banks, Plan B (aka Ben Drew) regularly discussed his future return to hip hop's gritty realism. Rumours swirled that his mooted follow-up, The Ballad of Belmarsh, would be self-released after his label 679 questioned its commerciality. Whatever the truth, ...Belmarsh was scrapped in favour of ill Manors, an unrelentingly bleak soundtrack to Drew's directorial debut of the same name...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2012-07-23
★★★★★
A Number One hit in England, the second album from this U.K. rapper-turned-crooner is a concept record that tells the story of a fictional soul singer who is falsely imprisoned. There is courtroom drama, there are harrowing scenes in prison showers and late-night bouts of conscience in jail cells. All of it is silly in the extreme...
- www.rollingstone.com
2011-04-18
★★★★★
British film actor Ben Drew became one of last year's major U.K. breakouts when his hardscrabble rapping persona Plan B morphed into Amy Winehouse's bespoke male counterpart on this pop-soul opera. As he tells this first-person tale of a singer who lands in jail after a fan falsely accuses him of rape, Drew's falsetto strains to equal his Motown heroes...
- spin.com
2011-04-04
★★★★★
Buy / Listen: 7Digital | Amazon | eMusic | We7 | Spotify When Cheryl Cole was forced to pull out of Jonathan Ross' chat show last month due to some sort of mysterious illness (why of course), her replacement was the not quite so famous Plan B. Nothing odd in that, you might think, accept that Plan B first came to our attention as an extremely angry, very foul mouthed rapper with an acoustic guitar. Hardly maninstream TV fare...
- www.state.ie
2011-01-25
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