4 HERO

Two Pages (Talkin’ Loud)

THE FUTURIST strand in black music is one of the genre’s less remarked-upon aspects, but it’s been around for decades, arguably ever since Chuck Berry stole a kiss at the turn of a mile in his shiny, gleaming new automobile (alright, so I’m extrapolating wildly here).

Think of Hendrix’s ‘1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)’, Sun Ra’s wild-eyed alien whisperings, George Clinton messing around on the P-Funk mothership, Miles Davis entering the darkness and embracing new technology during his 1970s fusion phase, and – more recently – the cubist doodlings of A Guy Called Gerald and the euphorically terrifying urban futureshock of Goldie’s Timeless.

UK junglists 4 Hero belong to the same sub-genre, both in the superficial aspects of their records (cosmic pyramid-eye artwork, song titles like ‘Planeteria’, ‘Pegasus 51’ and ‘Star Chasers’) and their refreshing willingness to explore the unknown terrain of hitherto unexplored musical surfaces.

Two Pages, their third album, is a mammoth double CD which sees the London due expanding and elaborating on the existing drum & bass blueprint, eager to diversify and drag disparate elements into the mix – whether it be the soul vox on ‘Golden Age Of Life’, which resembles a breakbeat out-take from Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, the downtempo hip-hop of ‘The Action’, or the string-laden classicisms of ‘Third Stream’.

Most of disc one is preoccupied with “organic” instrumentation, with each track whizzing by in a flurry of lush vocal harmonies, gentle-but-insistent percussion and sweetly sighing woodwind. By contrast, disc two sees them moving into less pastoral areas, forsaking the strings for the sequencers. ‘We Who Are Not As Others’ is aggressively armour-plated 90mph breakbeat mayhem, while the wonderful ‘Pegasus 51’ is set to a melody line so beautiful that it almost defies description.

The whole thing is almost two hours in length, so obviously listener discretion is advised, but after four listens I honestly still haven’t unearthed a bad or even mediocre track on it, even if it would have had slightly greater impact at a shorter length.

Drum & bass may have shot its collective bolt more than a year ago, but nobody appears to have told 4 Hero. On Two Pages, they have cast a beautifully open-ended spell. This record is easily good enough to stand proudly along Massive Attack’s Mezzanine And Goldie’s Saturnz Return, and I recommend it without reservation.

Jonathan O’Brien