Album Review

Every new style of music that comes along has its figurehead and face, someone whose name (perhaps more so than his or her music) becomes synonymous with the genre once it bubbles up from underground. This makes the music easier to understand, discuss and visualize – most of us have probably made Yanni the representative of today's New Age music, for instance, so that we have a face to laugh at.

In dance music, Moby is the face of techno, Tricky is the face of trip-hop, and the Orb are the face of ambient, though all of them have abandoned, disparaged or driven into the ground their respective genres. Ever since he released drum-and-bass's first fully realized album, Timeless, two years ago, Goldie has been the face of drum-and-bass. But late last year a rival face emerged from the underground: Roni Size, a fellow Brit, whose musically and structurally impressive New Forms outdid Timeless both as a pop and as a drum-and-bass album.

On his second album, Saturnz Return, Goldie plays "Can you top this?" by trying to merge drum-and-bass with modern classical, hip-hop, jazz, punk, soul, pop – everything but polka. The problem here is that his ambition far outstrips his talent, making him seem like the genre's Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Goldie's talents lie in programming soul into frenetic beats, stretching vocals into poetry on the computer and building lush breaks out of atmospheric sounds and strings. With this strange and bloated double album, Goldie may have blown his chance at remaining a face. Now he's a character, because this set seems more the product of a loner than of a leader.

Thematically and musically, Saturnz Return seems like two separate albums: One is the 60-minute "Mother," an orchestral composition that twiddles its thumbs for 15 minutes before even dropping a beat. Pillaging modern classical for a 30-piece string section with long, pretentious, melismatic vocals (from Diane Charlamagne), "Mother" may be the Titanic of dance music: It's enormous, it's overhyped and it's not seaworthy. Unlike the Aphex Twin's attempts to update Philip Glass with ramshackle electronics, Goldie's minimalism is empty. It's more New Age: Sounds nice, but it takes you nowhere.

The remainder of Saturnz Return is a hodgepodge, mostly of collaborations. There's the angry, caterwauling, Prodigylike punk of "Temper Temper," with Noel Gallagher on guitar; the ambient art-electro of "Truth," an uncredited bonus track with David Bowie that's drumless and bassless; and "Digital," an inferior mix of Goldie's recent work with KRS-One that attempts to connect the dots between hip-hop and drum-and-bass (best lyric: "I bet they'll mention me in the next century," which is less a boast than an obvious fact, seeing as how the year 2000 is only two years away).

Goldie shows his strengths when he's working more or less alone, as on "I'll Be There for You." Here he does what he's best at, programming a tensile chain-link fence of beats and sticking lush, sweeping melodies into the holes. There's also the slow and dramatic "Letter of Fate," a moody opus of vocoded vocals that even Goldie knows is the best piece here: In the liner notes, he identifies the song's writer as "Goldie's soul."

The problem, ultimately, with the attention being paid to Goldie and other faces is that drum-and-bass, like most dance genres, is not an album field per se. Its innovation takes place on 12-inch singles, more a disc-jockey product than a general consumer one. In most dance-music stores, bins are arranged not by artist but by record label, each of which has a reputation for a certain variant of the music – from the dark tech-step of No U-Turn to the ugly beauty of Goldie's Metalheadz label to the ambient drum-and-bass of LTJ Bukem's Good Looking to the stripped-down minimalism of Roni Size's Full Cycle. Far and away the best singles compilation released recently is V Classic, Volume 1, a greatest hits from Bryan Gee and Jumping Jack Frost's five-year-old V Recordings label. V Classic is a compilation full of big, deep, rolling drum-and-bass tracks perfect for dance floors, yet with enough soul and complexity to merit listening to at home. DJ Krust adds vocals to his "Maintain," rivaling Everything But the Girl for a pop-jungle hybrid, while Lemon D and Roni Size (who is on three of the compilation's 10 tracks) strive to merge cool jazz with rough-and-tumble beats on some of the club favorites that made the label's reputation. The arc of the compilation progresses from rawer tracks consisting mostly of cutup beats and floor-rattling bass lines to more-hybridized soul and jazz, and this seems to be where drum-and-bass is heading.

Perhaps more than any other dance style to emerge from England this decade, the flexible, addictive patter of drum-and-bass is bleeding across the entire spectrum of music and actually resulting in good, natural hybrids. After all, the most notable recent releases in the genre have been a Scottish fiddle drum-and-bass album (Martyn Bennett's Bothy Culture, on Rykodisc), a New Age one (Adam F's Colours, on EMI U.K.), two jazz-fusion records (by the bassist/programmer Squarepusher and the keyboardist/programmer James Hardway, a k a David Harrow) and some kind of postmodern classical collage (Goldie's Saturnz Return). Saturnz Return may fail as an ambitious concept album, but it does succeed as a murky crystal ball, divining the music's future as a little bit of everything. (RS 779)

NEIL STRAUSS

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