Tuesday, February 26, 2013

#775 Leftfield - Leftism

You can't put a price on being alive. Here's a heavy, arty house record that doesn't flow especially well, sounding like the singles-plus-filler album that it is, often sloppy and disjointed, reading like the opposite of the just-reviewed Underworld album. There is no particular perfection here, despite the discrete inputs and digital outputs. But it's alive. It's music that sounds like its moving out from under you, out from under itself, escaping artifice tentacle over tentacle, writing out of its four by four cell. Its lifeblood is the ragged toasting on the first couple of tracks, the scratching, the stuttering, the syncopation. Underworld made a Ferrari, this is the horses.

The downside is the heavy dub influence, with that overblown bass that I find so unpleasant, making everything sludgier than it has to be, especially on the leaden Original. But elsewhere, the music bristles with static and plays downright dynamic 3.5/5

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