Music

Matthew Herbert might be the most fascinating person working in music today. He’s also the most infuriating. He makes throbbing house singles, fronts a cracking jazz band and inspires great work as a producer. He also makes irritating conceptual art projects (like last year’s ‘Plat Du Jour’) where his unique samples (crunching apples, clucking factory-farmed chickens, crunched-up McDonald’s boxes, etc) are all freighted with a political significance that seems to overwhelm and stifle the music.

‘Scale’, featuring vocals from Dani Siciliano and some dazzling big-band funk orchestrations, was meant to be Herbert’s return to populist dance music. ‘I wanted to make an upbeat pop record,’ he said, ‘but you can’t do that when Dick Cheney’s in control.’ It’s as if every time Herbert the hedonistic raver starts to have fun, Herbert the intellectual puritan steps in to stop it, which creates a rather discomfiting tension throughout the LP.

But there are several slabs of genius: the frisky big-band disco of ‘Moving Like A Train’ could be from Jacko’s ‘Off The Wall’; ‘Something Isn’t Right’ trumps Elton in Philly; likewise the throbbing liquid house of ‘The Movers And The Shakers’. Herbert may be too damn odd to ever make a truly great pop record; this could be as close as he gets.