Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 01/08/2005
Label: Accidental

As the house culture that nurtured him has ebbed away from the dancefloor, Matthew Herbert's fondness for tracks built around sampled themes has become less a gimmick and more his modus-operandi. Allied to his growing politicisation, this musique concrete philosophy now finds him taking on the industrialised food industry within strict musical parameters. These dictate that all sampled sounds are directly related to the subject of each track. Hence the 12 here, a kind of sonic "Dispatches" investigation into the crap that we put in our stomachs.

"Plat De Jour" is composed of field recordings from chicken pens, supermarkets and even Heston Blumenthal's kitchen at the Fat Duck restaurant. The latter is an obvious kindred spirit since both give precedence to the thinking over the feeling in their respective arts. Since outlining his musical manifesto on 2001's "Bodily Functions", Herbert has purposefully restricted his palette, refusing to use sounds which already exist, such as factory preset synth or drum noises. Accident is encouraged and sampling other people's music is forbidden, as is synthesising the sound of acoustic instruments. (And having a laugh, you assume.)

So far, so cerebral. But, does "The Truncated Life Of A Modern Industrialised Chicken" rock the dancefloor? Will "Pigs In Sh*t" become a Friday night anthem for Pete Tong? It's doubtful, because, with a couple of rare exceptions, Herbert's knack for making dancefloor gems out of fantastically inappropriate raw materials has deserted him. As he's introduced more and more live performance and accident into his recording the discipline central to the house aesthetic has lost ground.

The resulting tracks are fascinating, certainly when considered in the light of their creation, but rarely as engaging as the music he made under former incarnations of Herbert and Doctor Rockit. Much of the record shares the thin acidic melodies of a late night Open University documentary for "Urban Geography 2:A. "White Bread Brown Bread" even begins to sound like the processed coughs and belches emitted by Ferris Bueller's Casio synth. Song structures wander around as aimlessly as the free-roaming chickens Herbert would prefer us to eat.

Certainly, "Plat De Jour" is one of the most ambitious records that will be released this year, and it's surely the only one that will deal exclusively with the body politic of the consumer stomach. But, crucially, eating is emotional. Herbert's discipline is far too rigid to have the final word.

    by James Poletti