Paul Lester
CD OFTHEWEEK
Perhaps even more than Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers, Artful Dodger are the most successful dance act in the United Kingdom today. Southampton thirtysomethings Mark Hill and Pete Devereux sold upwards of 1,5-million copies of their first three singles, Re-Rewind, Movin’ Too Fast and Woman Trouble, over the last 12 months. Like every dance-music form before it, garage (otherwise known as two-step, because the second and fourth bass-drum beat in every bar are omitted, creating its unusual faltering rhythm) will soon mutate into something quite different. The duo’s long-awaited debut LP, It’s All about the Stragglers (London), is less a signpost towards garage’s future than a glorious summation of the music to date.
A series of team-ups featuring a host of mainly unknown vocalists, It’s All about the Stragglers (London) is like a mix CD or a compilation. Re-Rewind and Movin’ Too Fast are here, as is Woman Trouble (co-starring David and Brit-soul man Robbie Craig). But there are other tracks that lend it a story-so-far feel: Something was a club hit but was never properly released; the same goes for What You Gonna Do, another vehicle for David’s dulcet tones.
So Artful Dodger’s first LP is also their first greatest hits collection. No surprise, really: this is great pop music, like Motown or Philly, with Devereux-Hill the Holland-Dozier-Holland or Gamble and Huff of the scene. And they are songs, not just looped grooves or repetitive beats. The duo’s commercial instincts have clearly been honed to the point where anything extraneous to the melody and the hook is removed (although the background detail is superb).
It’s true that there is a recognisable method to Artful Dodger’s hit making. There are signifiers of sophistication and classiness the Spanish guitar on Think about Me, the harpsichord on TwentyFourSeven to make your average hairy frat-rocker blanch. And the songs do all share a patented structure, with lyrics drawn from the language of teenage luv. Really, though, it’s no more smoothly calculated than, say, Travis and Coldplay’s rote miserabilism. Besides, when was the last time you heard a pizzicato violin motif on an indie-guitar record?