In art as in life, the problem with being ahead of your time is that you tend to wallow in poverty and obscurity because the rest of the world doesn’t care about you. In our day and age, the problem has been partially remedied. Between the magic of the Internet and the compulsions of hipsters who have nothing better to do with their lives, there are seemingly millions of people spending all of their time trying to find the next obscure, unknown and unloved but nonetheless culturally significant “big thing.” But still, chances are if you come up with something really new and interesting, someone else will get hugely wealthy just by copying you at a later date when everyone else is better prepared for it.
Faultline, “the UK’s hottest electronic export,” is probably going to get wealthy doing just that. At the very least, the band’s IDM-lite Your Love Means Everything has captured the attention of the enthusiastic but ADD-stricken British musical press, a group famed for hyping one band to death and then moving on to new pastures like a swarm of locusts.
But now the New Musical Express and all the other bastions of British tastelessness have firmly sunken their claws into Faultline. So let us turn our attentions in that direction. Your Love Means Everything feels like nothing less than a stale stab at copping the magic of some incredible electronic composition-based records to come out in the past year, including Lali Puna’s haunting Scary World Theory and even Radiohead’s Amnesiac.
Yet somehow, in attempting to jack the above-mentioned sounds, Faultline has produced a record which sounds more like a mating of Annie Lennox’ solo career to the brooding dub of Mezzanine-era Massive Attack. Now, I grew up in a house where Annie’s solo discs were blasted nonstop, sometime after our Fine Young Cannibals obsession but before Phantom of the Opera (shudder). And I definitely spent all of 10th grade going deaf to Mezzanine. So as far as I am concerned the concept is a wonderful one.
But Faultline pulls it off without a single moment of genuine excitement. Eleven of these 12 tracks sound mostly like whoever was playing piano for Annie is, well, playing piano for Annie. The guest vocalists, sadly, have nowhere near the fury of Ms. Lennox. In attempting to keep with this disc’s “somber” aesthetic, they come of as lackadaisical at best. Though there are some interesting names here?Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips has a track, as do Michael Stipe and the guy from Coldplay?they aren’t doing anything that notable. To add some dynamic shifts, Faultline occasionally samples some overdriven drums which Massive Attack already sampled, and attempts to use them in much the same way.
The album’s fifth track, “Waiting For The Green Light,” breaks the mold. First off, the vocals are by Harlem MCs and all around bad-asses Cannibal Ox, the duo responsible for last year’s incredible The Cold Vein. Secondly, the track’s production is a wild big-beat drum affair. So if you like that stuff, I guess this song is for you. It certainly doesn’t fit in well with the rest of the album. It sounds more like an additional track which the band recorded and couldn’t bear not to put on the record, so they threw it in there somewhere in the middle hoping that everything else would just gel around it. Nope.
But the track is hilarious because Cannibal Ox isn’t exactly at its strongest. The act’s frontman, Vast Aire, mostly just repeats the incredibly lame chorus, which starts just like a Mystikal track. “It ain’t my fault ? ” But this time it is. This material sucks. The only good news is that the group’s other guy, Vordul, who somehow broke his jaw last year forcing Can Ox to abandon a planned tour, has apparently healed. On this track he’s back, doing what he does best: talking, with a lovely cadence and only occasional nods to a rhyme structure. So that’s reassuring. Too bad pretty much nothing else here is.
