King Britt – The Intricate Beauty

 

Apparently, The Intricate Beauty is the “final conventional dance album King Britt will ever make”. Thank God for that. Of the eleven tracks on offer, only the sparse afrobeat timbres of Los (Main Mix), and the metrically perverse wobble bass of Blackhand rise above complete blandness. Almost every house music cliché –pristine hi hats, cheesy piano chords, soul diva vocals-is recycled ad nauseam, which, as you might imagine, quickly becomes grating. As the awfulness of Dizzee Rascal’s Dirtee Cash recently demonstrated, the hi-NRG beat, far from being full of ironic-retro cool, is painfully dated, and so why King Britt would think that an album’s worth of material based on it could be anything other than average is anyone’s guess. That said, the tracks are flawlessly executed, so, even if the final product itself is underwhelming, there’s at least the hope that future experimentation may present something more deserving of this album’s title.[Joe Barton]