Leftfield - Alternative Light Source (2015)
MP3 CBR 320 kbps | Tracks: 10 | 52:18 min | 120 Mb
Style: Electronic | Label: Infectious
MP3 CBR 320 kbps | Tracks: 10 | 52:18 min | 120 Mb
Style: Electronic | Label: Infectious
Smashing onto the scene in 1989, the 90s saw Leftfield carve themselves a niche in progressive dance, their success snowballing alongside contemporaries like Orbital, Underworld and Chemical Brothers, breaking electronic music from the depths of the underground, onto the stage and blasting into the charts. 20 years after the Mercury nominated ‘Leftism’, 16 years after that album’s Number One charting follow-up and five after reviving the name for a series of live shows, Neil Barnes has brought Leftfield back to the very centre of modern electronic music.
The world has changed in the 16 years since the release of Leftfield’s last studio album, 1999’s Rhythm and Stealth. The former duo is now a one-man band in the shape of Neil Barnes, the music industry the band succeeded in charming is moribund, and dance music, subsumed into the mainstream partly through the band’s own success (remember the Guinness advert?) has been a busted flush for a good decade.
The group were always among the real innovators of the scene with their absorption of dub and other genres and their combination of the cerebral with in-your-face bass. The new record doesn’t really break any moulds but it is a masterpiece of texture. Opener Bad Radio ends up sounding almost like fellow innovators Future Sound of London and the crunchy synth line in the break of the seven-minute Universal Everything is spine-tingling. Dark Matters builds over a submarine kick drum and marimba without you really noticing. As for standouts, the rising and filtering-up synth lines, repeated builds and impressionistic vocals from Channy Leaneagh of Poliça on Little Fish should make it a live favourite; Shaker Obsession has an irresistible drive; and the lassitude, scurf and attitude of Sleaford Mods’s Jason Williamson are the making of the unsettling Head and Shoulders.
Tracklist:
01. Bad Radio
02. Universal Everything
03. Bilocation
04. Head and Shoulders
05. Dark Matters
06. Little Fish
07. Storms End
08. Alternative Light Source
09. Shaker Obsession
10. Levitate for You