Drum'n'bass chancers done good Chase and Status have become producers to the stars. If only that meant fewer posturing cameos and more innovation
A great deal has changed for producers Saul "Chase" Milton and Will "Status" Kennard in the couple of years since they released their debut album. More Than Alot reached No 48, which was not bad for a drum'n'bass album on an indie label, but nothing to shake the world off its axis. You could have said the same thing about its contents. They audibly weren't the most original producers in the drum'n'bass firmament ? you did wonder a bit at the eureka moment that led them to open proceedings with a breakbeat take on a Lalo Schifrinesque theme, an idea drum'n'bass producers have been having regularly since about 1996. They varied their styles, though, trying their hands at dubstep and bump'n'grind soul ballads, and occasionally the ideas that weren't theirs still worked. If a collaboration with rapper Kano called Against All Odds had been any more transparent an attempt at mimicking the tumbling funk of Beyonc�'s Crazy in Love, it would have crammed its bum into a pair of denim hotpants and signed itself up with a lookalikes agency, but that didn't prevent it delivering a punch. And More Than Alot clearly acted as a hugely effective store front for their talents: American stars, including Rihanna and Snoop Dogg, came calling.
The chance to mix it with the Yanks is the British urban producer's dream come true. Suitably emboldened, No More Idols is clearly Chase and Status's push for mainstream, major-label success. Virtually every track features a cameo from a star guest, including Tinie Tempah and Dizzee Rascal. White Lies do the standard indie-band-awkwardly-marooned-on-a-dance-album turn, and Cee-Lo Green manages to distinguish himself by yodelling on the chorus of Brixton Briefcase, an oddly old-fashioned, Delbert Wilkinsish choice of song title. Substantially less surprising is Chase and Status's choice of musical route into the mainstream, which, initially at least, seems largely to involve sounding like Pendulum, with whom they share a manager. The opening tracks of No More Idols aim themselves squarely at the Max Power market: cue chugging nu-metal guitars and stadium rave synthesisers over metronomically thumping beats.
You can understand the commercial logic behind the decision. It's a style that, in Pendulum's hands, seems to polarise listeners into those for whom it's the most exciting thing imaginable and those for whom it sounds like an enormous, big-shorted moron stamping on the face of humanity for six minutes at a time, but there's enough of the former to pack stadiums and send Pendulum's last two albums to No 2 and No 1 respectively. Here, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that there's something crushingly monotonal about that style, even when Chase and Status drop the tempo. Like the album title and sleeve, featuring a snarling bulldog, the contents bend over backwards to convey iconoclastic anger and menace: "Blokes get battered, they get a Chelsea grin," sings Cee-Lo Green, who is from Atlanta, Georgia. It somehow doesn't work: the beats are too regimented, the sound too contrived and formulaic to suggest rebellion. And when Chase and Status try to deviate from the blueprint, drafting in their regular collaborator Plan B to add a sweet soul vocal to Fool Yourself, the results are so actively horrible it's hard to know where to look while you're listening.
It's also slightly disappointing that Chase and Status felt they had to do this, not least because No More Idols contains good ideas ? some of the music here is more original than anything on their debut album. End Credits features Plan B's voice again, this time accompanied by a wistful acoustic guitar and strings atop the breakbeats, and it has already made the top 10. Blind Faith, a flatly brilliant pop record that sets a mournful, reggae-infused vocal against a vast diva-screamed chorus perfectly captures the euphoria and melancholy of the dancefloor at the end of the night.
The best thing here might be Midnight Caller, an impressively smart inversion of the standard rub-you-up-and-down-all-night-long R&B ballad, on which the beats drag a little too slowly, the backing feels a little too distorted for comfort, and the woman offering to do the rubbing is gradually revealed to be a stalker. Listening to it, you can see why America might come calling ? it takes perhaps the least interesting aspect of modern R&B and puts an intriguing new spin on it. Less easy to grasp is why, if Chase And Status can come up with music that's subtle, clever, original and commercial, they'd chose to spend half their time coming up with music that's only one of those things.
dennis hopper leslie nielsen jd salinger l\'il wayne emma watson
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