Orbital:"In Sides"
Internal, TRUCD10 (72 mins)
Dial-a-track code: 1201
Like its predecessors, Orbital's fourth album is state of the art electronic music but electronic, music with heart, soul, beauty, emotion and humour. Manipulating moods and atmospheres with the slide of a fader, the Hartnoll brothers create music which is increasingly impossible to categorise as mere dance music.
The recent single, The Box, is as Morriconic as it gets on this outing, a soundtrack for an inner city spaghetti western shot by Sam Peckinpah. P.E.T.R.O.L and The Girl With The Sun In Her Head (recorded using power from the Greenpeace mobile solar generator, eco fans) are electro anthems, tracks which expand rather than buckle under the solid breakbeats. This vitality is perfectly balanced by more ambient moments, making In Sides in the process an album as close to perfect as it's possible to get.
The Beloved: "X"
EastWest, 0630-13316-2 (59 mins)
Dial-a-track code: 1311
The Beloved are a bit out of sorts in 1996. The sound they championed has all but disappeared from clubland, replaced by drum'n'bass, hip hop and new variations on a dub theme. The Beloved's patented blissed out house is no longer the chill out sound of choice, forcing Jon Marsh and friends to look elsewhere for inspiration.
Despite some fine deep house and tough techno tracks, X still drifts back to The Beloved's old haunts and habits; stylish and well constructed songs like the strung out Deliver Me are finely tuned, but the creative kudos here belongs to the thumping Cajual disco of Crystal Wave and Satellite. These highlights aside, X is a bit of letdown, proving once again that too much ambience is bad for the soul.
Various Artists: "LTQ Bukem Presents Logical Progression"
ffr, 828 739-2 (2 CDs, 142 mins) Dial-a-track code: 1421
Anyone with a taste for innovative music should place this compilation on their shopping list right away. Featuring the best releases from LTQ Bukem's Good Looking label, Logical Progression is an indication of just how far drum'n'bass has travelled from such intimate London launch pads as Speed and The Blue Sessions. These days, the future sound of jungle is joining up the dots in a global fashion and naturally, Bukem is at the centre of things, day glo crayons at the ready.
Combining jazzy breaks, ambient atmospherics and full on strings with killer drumbeats, the Good Looking sound is euphoric, emotional and visionary. With such masters at work as PFM, Peshay, Photek and Bukem himself in selector mode, it's one futuristic groove after another.
Lionrock: "An Instinct For Detection"
Deconstruction, 74321342812 (70 mins)
Dial a track code: 1531
It's something of a Nineties, trademark, a full length album from a top name DJ, and Justin Robertson is the latest to climb into the frame. As any clubber who has caught him in action will testify, a night with Robertson behind the decks is a bit of an adventure; never one to champion one sound when half a dozen will do, he was defining the freestyle genre of DJ-ing long before it had a name.
Not surprisingly, then, An Instinct For Detection has room for Studio One dub trickery, rough and tough hip hop breaks, MC Buzz B poetry, messed up techno grooves and some top notch Sherlock Holmes references. With MC Buzz B in biting lyrical form and the Lion rock sound system in storming mood, tracks like Fire Up The Shoeshaw and Snapshot On Pollard Street are fired up assaults on the senses.
