Artist: UNKLE
Title: What Are You To Me?
Date: March 13, 2005
UNKLE’s first album was a stunning collaboration that came out of left field and showed what great things were possible when a handful of talented artists including (famously) Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Beastie Boy Mike D, and others were harnessed under a grand musical design by producer James Lavelle (creator of the Mo’Wax label) and beat-meister DJ Shadow. If I had only one complaint against Psyence Fiction, it would be that it never really coalesced into a unified album.Cut 5 years into the future: 2003. UNKLE’s Never Never Land drops with no fanfare (well OK, so Psyence Fiction didn’t exactly make the top 40 either…), and with a loud protest from DJ Shadow, who made it vocally clear that he didn’t have anything to do with this one, and he wasn’t going to ever work with UNKLE again. While the loss of his maniacal percussion and adept studio production is definitely felt on Never Never Land, it is more than made up for by the unique soundscape that Lavelle has created out of the entire album. This record feels so tightly integrated that it’s hard to think of this as a collaborative work (which it still is, featuring contributions by members from the Stone Roses, Massive Attack, and others).
Picking one song from such a tightly-knit album is tough for me. On my first pass of the album, the tracks “Eye 4 An Eye” and “In A State” jumped out for their immediate beats and power (as evidently Lavelle also realized, since he mixed those two tracks onto his amazing Global Underground Romania), but over multiple listens, I’ve found that lesser known tracks such as “What You Are To Me” are equally potent, if not more so.
Tags: unkle, what are you to me?
Leave a Reply