Broken Home

It’s happened to everybody: Someone well versed in current trends and music inevitably asks if you’ve heard a particular song, and by all means you should have. However, this one song managed to slip through the cracks, and you’re left questioning your musical omniscience.

Today I review an album containing a song by one of those bands, and it begs the question: can a massive, world-spanning, flash-in-the-pan drum ’n’ bass track possibly beget a stellar record a full year later?

It’s impossible to review Rudimental’s debut album, Home, without first reviewing the single that likely spawned the entire record, last year’s “Feel the Love.” The song sounds like it came straight from a commercial instructing kids to stop playing video games and go outside.

“Feel the Love” is a sneaky track that snuck under a lot of otherwise counter-culturally tuned radars. But the catch is that the music only resembles a commercial because the production is so slick and the hooks are so sweet that it sounds like it has millions of dollars worth of luster.

All of that aside, the song is good. In fact, record executives thought it was so good that more than a year later an album featuring the song was released. Why so long? you might ask.

In today’s electronic music environment, the single is hailed above all else. When electronic acts play live, nobody wants to hear a full album or even choice cuts from one.

At electronic events, revelers want to hear a steady stream of danceable tracks; there’s rarely room for anything but the singles. Unless you are Moby, Orbital or some other electronic act with decades of staying power, full-lengths are normally a faux pas. The music just doesn’t lend itself to an extended odyssey.

Getting right to the point, the music found on Home is adequate when you consider that the record was constructed solely around “Feel the Love.” Without this context, the album is a wreck.

It’s nice that Rudimental managed to duplicate some of the panache found on “Feel the Love” by sticking to the song’s strict formula on a handful of other tracks. However, the remainder of the album is marred by plodding, lazy house music and painful hooks laid down by people who should have known better.

In fact, only one track on Home that doesn’t sound exactly like “Feel the Love” is even passable—the album’s title cut. The vocals are sultry and engaging, and the song itself is a concise down-tempo jam.

Of course, “Feel the Love” comes immediately after. If you’ve never heard the track, that’s OK, because tens of millions of people have—and, to be honest, the song could probably have reached “Gangnam Style” levels of recognition had it been any electronic offshoot other than drum ’n’ bass.

Even though the song is a year old—which is around 30 years old in electronic music years—it has staying power because of John Newman’s vocals. They don’t sound like a sample because they’re not, and they lend some soul to a genre that normally sounds like robots farting.

Two other songs on Home sound like slight variations of “Feel the Love.” One such iteration, “Not Giving In,” even features Newman reprising his role as soulful contrast to drum ’n’ bass’ intrinsic womp-wompery. Newman must simply command a higher-functioning level of creativity.

It is when Rudimental strays from the formula that things get slapdash. “Hell Could Freeze” starts out promisingly: The emcee guesting on the track is tight and focused, with a decent flow.

But in no time flat, the members of Rudimental shelve that talent in favor of patchy, gloomy house music and a hook so boring that it defies all songwriting logic. The rapping included, the track comes off as an even more boring C+C Music Factory, doomed to the badlands of 99-cent CD bins on albums like Jock Jams 2.

Unlike so much of the record, the vocals on “Powerless” are actually…very dynamic and alluring. Though it’s one of the record’s bright spots, let’s not forget that the doldrums on Home swallow up these nuggets of hope with the force of 100 black holes.

The album’s closer is laughably bad, and concludes with a sample of a large-sounding crowd chanting some lyrics from “Feel the Love,” as if it wasn’t glaringly obvious yet that the entire record exists because of that song.

It seems as if the album has already been judged in the court of public opinion. “Spoons” bombed because it sucks. “Feel the Love” succeeded because it’s good.

The rest of the dreck on Home might be excusable if Rudimental was just one guy flying the plane into the mountain. Sadly, Rudimental is composed of four people.

Does it really take four guys to make boring house and glossy drum ’n’ bass? Noisia has three guys and they’re incredible. Do yourself a favor and check them out—literally any album will be better than this one. In fact, I’d rather listen to the guvys in Noisia talk about what they ate for lunch than this record.