These are exciting times in music; a return to purity, risk-taking and truth-telling. Yet it has been some time since we have seen the likes of BILAL OLIVER. His prodigious debut album 1st Born Second, is a symbolic raising of the bar. He grew up on the cusp of the eighties: the launch of MTV, Prince's Dirty Mind, Reganomics, the digital revolution, the lingering stank of Parliament's Motor Booty Affair and "Rapper's Delight". At barely twenty-one years old, Bilal Oliver is clearly possessed with that oldest instrument: the Voice.