If the portents are to be believed – and they're even to be found in a somewhat downbeat sleeve note from Faithless' reclusive founder, Rollo Armstrong – this fourth album represents both the London-based dance outfit's tenth birthday present to themselves and their fans, and their epitaph. A series of largely negative, vaguely derisive and generally
very wrong reviews have revealed that Faithless are a band at best underappreciated, at worst misunderstood. But what's so difficult about them, and this engaging, thoughtful and often really rather beautiful record?
Always about far more than a drug-assisted 3am rave high, Faithless have been making considerable albums all along, constantly aspiring to a widescreen vision without sacrificing an eye for the telling minutiae that informs the writing of their premier lyricist, Maxi Jazz. It's his "Mass Destruction" that sets the tone here, a beautifully observed examination of the effects of war on non-combatants – specifically, the children of soldiers – that bookends the record. The version released as a single, re-tooled by that other Faithless discovery, the excellent P*Nut, sits at the end of "No Roots", a part and yet apart, its angry
roar at odds with the measured calm of the rest of the album. The original version is almost unrecognisable, a meditative poem set to a silky glide of a track that broods and swells at the beginning of the album.
In between lies probably Faithless' second best album, not quite the equal of "Sunday 8pm" but running it pretty close, and perhaps lyrically its better. While that second LP was content to examine the small-scale and close at hand – life on the road, relationships – this
one has a truly global sweep, echoed by music that works just as easily in your head whether listened to on a plane, looking down through the clouds to the earth below, or standing on a street corner scanning the sky. Faithless' gift is to offer both at once – the personal and intimate, the sweeping overview – with music perfectly tooled to match.
The only let-downs here are in the protracted instrumentals, in which Faithless sound like any other house-derived band, struggling to think of anything to do other than modify the riffs incrementally as each fourth bar demands another layer of instrumentation. "Sweep" recalls Fini Tribe, and "Pastoral" loses the record's focus at a crucial point two thirds of the way through. That said, "Swingers", which could be New Order attempting to play the Prodigy's "Narayan", has hardly any lyrics, but remains compulsive listening.
But Faithless are at their best when Maxi is on the mic, when their mesmerising, immersive music is allied to lyrics that burrow into the brain every bit as effectively as the sounds get under your skin. "What About Love" is this album's "Insomnia" or "God Is A DJ", when Maxi's debt to the largely forgotten Manchester rapper MC Buzz B is at its greatest. "Bluegrass" is terrific, a paranoid urban blues that offers no answers but asks all the right questions, the title track a prayer of timeless love, "In The End" an incantation for the dispossessed.
It's stirring stuff, whatever their future has in store.
