She’s just checking that she’s not casting some grotesque shadow, as the sickly mood lighting perfectly complements her sad-eyed country melodies. Based on vocal and orchestral samples culled from The Undisputed Truth’s version of “Ball of Confusion”, the single “Eye for an Eye” is typical, its dramatic flourishes punctuated by the muttered queries: “Who’s done this? Who’s killed us?”; Homme’s haunted vocal on the bass-heavy maelstrom of “Safe in Mind” is similarly suspicious – “Someone’s found a way/ To break into my mind” – while “Panic Attack” features yet another lost-soul murmur adrift in echoey swirls of synth. The most sophisticated piece is probably “In a State”, in which Mani’s bass underpins an Underworld-style mix of acoustic guitar and strings livened up by expressive tom-toms and a climactic swell of 140 vocal tracks Amazingly, it all fits together beautifully.. There is an overall tone this time, wary and paranoid, very like on a Massive Attack recording, even when 3D’s sinister murmur isn’t involved. The immediate result is a more stable, generic sound, Shadow’s fractured scratch-scapes replaced by File’s fragile, high-register vocals and songs that, for all their stylistic twists and turns, are generally grounded in a bed of acoustic guitar. So, despite the presence, as on its predecessor, of a diverse group of guests including Jarvis Cocker, Brian Eno, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, 3D of Massive Attack and the former Stone Roses Ian Brown and Mani Mounfield, Never, Never, Land seems less of a compilation and more of a production album.
His previous collaborator DJ Shadow having departed after UNKLE’s 1998 debut, Psyence Fiction, James Lavelle has hooked up with the singer-songwriter-DJ-programmer Richard File for this follow-up album. A fine selection on the whole, though, but spoilt by the bizarre inclusion of two incongruent rock-band tracks (by Spymob and The High Speed Scene), which The Neptunes didn’t even produce.. It works best with the more characterful voices and eccentric verbalists – Busta is outstanding on the booty anthem “Light Your A** on Fire”. This compilation affirms the duo’s current production pre-eminence, with Ludacris, Kelis, Snoop Dogg, Nas and Nelly all lining up for Neptunisation, a process that usually involves a stripped-down beat, an electro twitch or two, and little more besides. Chad and Pharrell’s career course appears no more settled now, with the latter apparently dead set on establishing himself as a solo artist – he grabs every opportunity here to appear as guest vocalist on tracks featuring such as Busta Rhymes and Dirt McGirt (Ol’ Dirty’s latest alias), and persuades Jay-Z to fulfil a similar function on his own single, “Frontin’”, which reveals Pharrell to have a fragile, inveigling falsetto.
The story so far: having established their reputation through production work for the likes of Britney, Jay-Z, P Diddy, NSync and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the nu-wave R&B backroom boys Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo opted to change their name from The Neptunes to N*E*R*D (No One Ever Really Dies) when it came to recording their own album, In Search of…; then, no sooner had it been released than they decided to delete it forthwith and re-record the entire thing with “proper” instruments (read: heavy guitar riffs), thus ensuring the album fell between a multitude of stools and disappeared without trace. “What we’ve found,” says their enthusiastic manager David Acquet, “is that the current surge in interest has led people to look more deeply into the catalogues, beyond obvious things like Buena Vista Social Club and Orchestra Baobab.” The bad news for those two embattled giants EMI and Universal is that he and his colleagues are now running promotional campaigns for specialist labels such as Naxos, Navras (Indian classical) and Wrasse (Africa and South America).”Obviously, a lot of our clientele are tourists,” Acquet adds, “but others are regular customers with whom we’re on first-name terms, who come in every month and simply take what we recommend.”. No surprise that this latter label’s two Desert Blues compilations have become instant best-sellers, or that its Russian, Balkan, and Afghan compilations have become brand leaders: beautifully produced, with substantial liner-notes, they prove that serious ethnomusicology really can slip down a treat.Which is exactly what I find when I look in on the Tower Records emporium in Piccadilly. Yet this is an experimental product by a top Chinese classical musician, who celebrates – rather than betrays – her musical heritage. It’s serious stuff.My next stop is Harmonia Mundi, the French record company that distributes a range of small independent labels, and whose sales director Patrick Lemanski leaves me in no doubt about the way the commercial wind is blowing. Ten years ago, classical music accounted for 80 per cent of their sales: now it’s down to 45 per cent, while world music, originally a sideline, has risen to 30 per cent.What can he tell me about his clientele? He laughs.