Rudimental - Toast to Our Differences
The Guardian 60
(Atlantic)
Rudimental are the perfect band for people who like music and enjoy dancing but don’t really care about either. They’ve collected another grab bag of party tunes that sound as good on your phone as in an arena, fronted by a dizzying number of featured vocalists. Largely they steer away from the polite, very British drum’n’bass that made them famous, toward Jamaica and America, landing comfortably in the profitable hinterland between Calvin Harris’s cold calculation and Major Lazer’s wild abandon.
Continue reading... Sun Jan 27 08:00:36 GMT 2019The Guardian 60
(Asylum Records)
Some songs are written. Others are built. Rudimental, the Hackney pop-dance quartet who have become one of the country’s biggest groups, cleave to the latter approach. There’s nothing theoretically wrong with this – some of the greatest pop ever, from Motown to SAW to Calvin Harris has benefitted from a factory method, where joyful elements are crammed in and welded together for maximum euphoria. But Rudimental’s approach is so nakedly modular that it can feel less like you’re listening to a song and more like you’re reading a Wickes catalogue.
Each track features between one and three guest vocalists, and surprisingly it’s that weirdly popular British archetype – doughy, throatily earnest white men in the Rag’n’Bone Man mould – that anchor some of the best. Tom Walker uses a robust descending scale to create the album’s best chorus on Walk Alone – it won’t be rivalling the same lyric at Anfield but has real heft – and James Arthur’s vocal fry works nicely against bright tropical house on 2017 hit Sun Comes Up. Another of these blokes, Maverick Sabre, pairs really strongly with star-in-waiting Yebba on the peppily waltzing They Don’t Care About Us: she drifts into beautiful Aretha-isms on the long coda.
But the album falters when the voices aren’t as strong and vivid as hers. The Cockney burr of Hak Baker and the untamed scansion of Kojey Radical are made all the more refreshing when you have to munch through the generic pop vocals of Kevin Garrett, Raye, Raphaella and others. At other times, the hyper-collaborative approach – designed to reach more genre fans in a streaming culture – lacks integration. A skanking collaboration between Major Lazer, Anne-Marie and Mr Eazi sounds like an ad commission for a Gen Z hatchback, and the smart pairing of Ray BLK and Stefflon Don ends up muting both of them with bland tropical house. Rudimental also remain incapable of bringing any jeopardy to their laminated version of drum’n’bass: Jess Glynne and Chronixx over D’n’B is a great idea on paper, but the verses nicked from Sam Sparro and the clean, rigid drums scupper it, while Rita Ora’s own junglist moment is even less spirited. The group remain the figurehead for the major label creative process, for better and worse.