The Bottom Line: A good album, but not a great one. Even so, it deserves to be up there with the classics, simply because of the effect it's had on its genre.
First, something needs to be corrected: this album is not 'Hip Hop and R&B', far from it. It's dance, with only hints of genre-crossover. When it was first released five years ago, it was hailed as one of the most seminal works this type of music had ever seen, and although I don't feel qualified to give it this kind of perspective, I can understand where those opinions came from. I'll take you through the tracks.
The first track, Release The Pressure, starts off like trance music, mixing into relaxed, echoey electronica. Then, unexpectedly, Earl Sixteen starts singing some cod-mystical lyrics, signalling the beginning of almost reggae-like stylings. This is not a good introduction to the album.
Afro-Left uses distorted, faux-flamenco guitar, and foreign-language lyrics with conventional drums and hand-claps, until, two and a half minutes in, some more interesting electronic sounds begin. Finally, after another couple of minutes, the track gains complexity, but it's too late. In the end it's an over-long seven minutes.
Melt, sampled by Death In Vegas, has some Vangelis-esque electronic treble. It's ambient, and only later throws in a few more elements, such as some stronger bass and a dropping feedback noise.
With the fourth track, Song of Life, things get better. It has some disconcerting prayer-like wailing over low bleeps and then a nice, slow, edgy drum rhythm. Later, there are brief strings and more electronics, and static in the background, then an unexpected increase in tempo and thumping bass. The wails are sadly mostly lost, to be replaced by fast scratching. By the end, nothing is left of the beginning. It occupies another, much better-deserved, seven minutes.
Original has some scary chorused lyrics, then some nice moderately-paced drums and almost vocal bass electronics. The lyrics, by Toni Halliday, lose their chorus effect and their mystery. It builds, with some more bass and hints of much quicker drums.
Black Flute, half way through the album, has thumping drums interspersed with and then mixing into sinister trance lines, then reseparating, then mixing back in with lighter drums. Faster, jungle-like drums are added, then everything is pulled away, and we get fast drums and jangling as it flows into the next track, Space Shanty, until again everything is stripped away to make room for shifting sci-fi electronica and then more drums, building into the kind of crescendo familiar from more mainstream house, before sliding in some synthesiser guitar and more great jangling, then barely recognisable 'yeah, yeah's. It doesn't end there, because Leftfield lays on some hard jungle drums for good measure.
Inspection (Check One) could be twisted, wizzened, irregular hip-hop until the reverbed voice pulls away and some cut-up drums come in, and then the words come back, innocuously jungle-fast compared to the swaggering drums. Only two thirds of the way through do you notice the creepy synthesiser in the background. Dirtier electronics come in later.
Storm 3000 is enjoyably barren, with echoey grindings and high drums, until swimmy, varying bleeps come in and spin everything around. It all gets more and more intense until the final minute, when the bleeps and hissings are laid bare, along with what sounds like sampled thunder. This is one of the album's best tracks, and it's mixed straight into the penultimate track, Open Up, which begins with more spooky chanting, which changes to English later on with some melodramatic weirdly-accented rhyming declamation over the same old drums. When he starts singing 'You ruled this earth... la la la' it all gets too absurd. After four minutes it mutates into a much slower, laid-back, open beat, and back to the fantastic spooky chanting.
The final track is called 20th Century Poem. The dramatically intoned lyrics verge on the pretentious, and don't really complement the ambient background, only starting to work with the music when a quicker, electronic pulse comes in. The six minutes as a whole are over-relaxed.
I hope I've given you some idea of what kind of stuff you'll expect to find in this album. It's easy to see why it was so influential: it showed that dance music could have real subtlety and intelligence to it, rather than just moving people's feet and selling records. More recent, acclaimed acts like Death In Vegas probably owe a lot to the pioneering Leftfield. That's not to say there aren't a lot of flaws; in my opinion, the album would have worked a lot better as a continuous mix, because the tracks taken separately are pretty fragmented. There are a lot of ideas crammed into each six or seven minute piece, and sometimes the contrasts are great but sometimes it simply doesn't work. Also, a lot of the vocals are hard to take seriously, and the chanting and wailing, which work as a perfect natural counterpoint to the artificiality of the pounding synthesisers and drum machines, were comparatively underused. Same with the guitar: we've seen recently, in albums like The Contino Sessions, how creatively applied guitar can add a lot to rhythms.
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