Album: Dizzee Rascal <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

Maths + English, XL

Maths + English finds Dizzee Rascal stuck where he was on 2004's Showtime, seeking to "climb the ladder of life, the wall of enlightenment", but being tugged back by old beefs and attitudes. "There's a world outside that I want to connect you with," he claims in the opener "World Outside", though it's unlikely that even the most insular fan would be unaware of such A-list types as Lily Allen, his unimpressed foil on "Wanna Be" ("What do you know about being a hardman? Your mother buys your bling!") or Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner, sampled on "Temptation". That still sounds like a pretty parochial world, and the rapper's slide back into old attitudes with tracks like the self-explanatory "Paranoid", routinely antipathetic "Suck My Dick" and put-down "Pussyole" - believed to be a dig at his nemesis Wiley - seems sadly retrograde. Things improve with "Bubbles", Dizzee's appreciation of his £110 Nike trainers, and "Where's Da G's", in which his target's gangsta credentials are scorned to the accompaniment of an innovative harpsichord sample; but that "wall of enlightenment" is clearly steeper than he anticipated.