“In early 2000 BBE hooked up with Pete Rock and he decided to produce an eclectic album for our BEAT GENERATION. A fusion of jazz, pop, folk, rock and soul laces this ground-breaking project. A scattering of MC tracks (featuring a new crew called the UN) are also present to whet the appetites of Pete’s traditional fan base. The UN features Rock Marciano and newcomers Divine, Godfree and Laku. Sit back and enjoy beat manipulation from one of hip hop’s maestros – The Number One Soul Brother!” – taken from the inlay sleeve of PeteStrumentals.

I must start off by saying that this album has one of the poshest CD cases I have the pleasure to own: nice shiny cardboard, little outter cover thing that I’m sure to lose and it closes with a magnet. Nice.

Now on with the music. I wish I owned, let alone drove, a car. Unfortunately I don’t so I am unable to check my gut feeling that this is perfect car music. However I can say that Mr Rock makes very groovy chill out music, although on first listen I did spend about 10 minutes wondering when the vocals would kick in. You see, daft as I am I associate hip hop with rapping, and PeteStrumentals proves me wrong as the vast majority of the songs on here are instrumentals whose roots are firmly planted in soul and disco music with a bit of funk and electronic wizardry thrown in. There are some great pieces of music on here, such as Something Funky and Pete’s Jazz.

But I do have critisisms of this album, and that is that some of the songs simply scream out for vocals as they just don’t stand up on their own feet. As a result Petestrumentals seems to drag itself out a bit too much and parts of it sound a bit samey. Which is a shame as it is otherwise a good record.