Coldcut - Only Heaven

Pitchfork 52

“Deejays predate the internet, in a way,” Coldcut’s Jonathan More told the Chicago Tribune in 1997. “We’re filters who select information from different sources and give it a context for people to grab on to.” That probably made a certain amount of sense then, right on the cusp of the dot-com boom, but compared to everything that happened next—MP3 downloads, P2P networks, YouTube, Spotify—the idea of a DJ as a crucial node in a global information network sounds as antiquated as a tin-can-and-string toy telephone. And so, in its own quaint way, does Coldcut’s debut single, “Say Kids What Time Is It?,” which will celebrate its 30th anniversary in February. A cut-and-paste hip-hop jam inspired by Steinski’s turntable collages, the tune sampled a mess of funk and disco breaks along with snippets of The Jungle Book and the theme to the 1950s television show “Howdy Doody”—a show that, when Coldcut recorded the song, was roughly as distant in time as their debut single is from us today.

Coldcut have always had a McCluhan-esque fascination with the collision of form and content. That was the driving impulse behind those early experiments in turntablism and sampling, which mimicked the distracted zapping encouraged by cable television and remote controls. But as the flow of information has sped up, Coldcut have struggled to articulate a compelling framework for their own productions, even as their label, Ninja Tune, has asserted itself as a leading force in beat-oriented electronic music. Their last album, 2006’s Sound Mirrors, brought together dancehall beats and acid house with spoken word from Saul Williams, snippets of the poet Amiri Baraka’s voice, and tag-team sloganeering from Jon Spencer and Mike Ladd—an eclectic assemblage that couldn’t quite decide where it wanted to go or what it wanted to be.

This new EP, their first release in a decade, looks at first like an attempt to engage with our own critical media moment, in which “message” is smothered by a deluge of disinformation. The record cover strikingly juggles elements of mid-20th-century Polish poster design, the staticky “snow” of a dead television screen, and the scrambled logo of the Daily Mail, a right-wing populist tabloid in the UK; press materials present the record as “an exercise in ‘dissentertainment’.” But nothing in the EP’s five tracks measures up to that rhetoric. Mostly, it serves as a vehicle for the London rapper Roots Manuva and the singer Roses Gabor, although their contributions sound like they were meant for two entirely different records.

On lead track “Only Heaven,” Roots Manuva rattles off stream-of-consciousness assonant rhymes (“Molotov quality/Causing controversy/Oh, it’s so odd to see/Oh, it’s so novelty”) that sound great—he’s such a personable vocalist, he could make the phone book sound catchy—but don’t add up to much. On the chorus, a sighing Roses Gabor offers platitudes: “Only heaven can ever save me/Feels like hell out on these streets/I need you more than you need me.” Like worn Velcro, the two halves fail to stick together, and the backing track, a twinkling approximation of early Portishead, doesn’t make up for what’s missing lyrically; the same goes for the closing “Quality Control,” a woozy dub version of the title cut.

The languid “Dreamboats” is more interesting musically, particularly in a narcotic breakdown that loops Gabor’s voice against clanking chains and ethereal coos. But again, Roots Manuva’s third-eye mindstates and Gabor’s vaguely erotic hook fail to complement each other in any meaningful way. “Creative,” meanwhile, might as well be Coldcut’s homage to Disclosure’s brand of garage-influenced house—which is ironic, given the song’s anti-biter vocal hook, which they’ve sampled from a 1989 single by the South London rapper Black Radical MKII. More charitably, you could compare its swirls of layered synths to Four Tet, but that’s not enough to make it sound particularly vital.

Musically, the most interesting thing here is “Donald’s Wig,” a rolling drum’n’bass tune featuring Gabor solo. Unfortunately, it flies the furthest from the mark they’ve set for themselves with the “dissentertainment” tag. Perhaps the topic seemed like a good idea at the time, when they went into the studio; from afar—across the Atlantic, and, crucially, months before the U.S. presidential election of November 2016—a tongue-in-cheek song about Donald Trump must have appeared a fairly low-stakes affair. It is precisely the kind of absurdist, media-savvy, vaguely political thing that Coldcut have always delighted in. But the song fails to engage with its subject matter in any meaningful way beyond the title, even though the press release explicitly references the then-candidate, now president-elect. The hook—“Don’t give up your race/Days are going to wait”—was presumably meant in the context of the electoral race, but as the specter of white nationalism looms ever larger over Trump’s cabinet and rabid fan base, the line comes to seem unfortunately vague at best.

Post-election and, for the UK, post-Brexit, we’re well aware of all the ways the media has failed us. Rather than providing a superficial media critique, Coldcut would be better off taking a page from their own book and returning to the righteous anger that fueled their 2002 remix with Saul Williams, “Not in My Name.”