If a group can be named as ‘influential’ in the ephemeral scene that is club music, Meat Beat Manifesto would fit the bill. Perhaps they’re not immediately recognisable names like Fatboy Slim or the Prodigy, but the cognoscenti know they were there first. Their seminal 1989 single “Radio Babylon” was perhaps the first major breakbeat/jungle song, so spectacular it was sampled by both the Prodigy and the Future Sound of London. Meat Beat Manifesto songs appear on both the Chemical Brothers’ mix CDs. And yet, for all that, Actual Sounds and Voices prove, in the end, a disappointment. As an Englishman in California might say: Bugger, dude.
The English expatriate in question is MBM’s front man Jack Dangers, a Brit from Swindon currently residing in San Francisco. The liner notes’ droll statement that Dangers is responsible for “Voice, Bass and Stuff” hardly covers the range of his contribution - it would be safer to say perhaps that Dangers is MBM, considering that he writes, produces and engineers all the songs. And these are songs that require massive amounts of production, with layer upon layer of samples creating a pastiche that is the aural equivalent of overcaffeination.
The obscure samples are gleaned from Dangers’ obsessive record collecting (the album title itself is a reference to a statement on the sleeves of sound-effects albums from the 1960s) and stitched together seamlessly in his computer with the actual playing of instruments: this might be the only album out this year that features the line “Some extracts were recorded directly from shortwave radio” in its liner notes. Somewhere in between all the beats there’s a live drummer. Or so they claim. The supporting players - Lynn Farmer on drums / percussion and John Wilson on prepared guitars - are certainly adequate, but they’re just as certainly subordinate to the frenetic breakbeats of the tunes.
Some of those beats are best shown in the high point of the album, “Acid Again”. This first single off the album opens with a superb speech sample of a woman nonchalantly rambling (we speculate that her proclamation that “I live for drugs, it’s great” will reappear as a sample in some other song) before launching into a repeated sample of her reaction to a bad LSD experience (“I’ll never acid again”) placed over huge shifting beats. An ironic jibe at the acid house elements of their own music? Perhaps, or perhaps not; in any case, this is an amazing trip of a song.
The comedown, however, sets in quickly. When Meat Beat Manifesto play to their strength of elaborate beats, as they do with “Acid Again” or “Let’s Have Fun”, the results are powerful reaffirmations of their reputation and to how well their songs can work on the dance floor. “New methods, new machines, new products” goes the sample that opens “Prime Audio Soup”, and indeed the full album displays MBM’s technical mastery of all three. What Dangers isn’t, however, is a great singer, and the album’s weak points are the songs in which his vocals are given prominence. The delightfully hyperkinetic drum machine on “Let Go”, for example, is overshadowed by the entrance of Dangers’ voice. Even the short “set me free” chant of “Prime Audio Soup” begins to grate when it gets looped as the vocal theme of the tune. More actual sounds, less voices, please.
There is a tendency, too, towards cheesiness in some songs. We’re not griping about the tracks that are purely speech samples - those tend to be hilarious, as in “The Tweek”, which is a discussion of the quality of different radio waves and bleeps (some noises are “Swishers”, others are “Whistlers”). But songs like “Hail to the Bopp” which features whispered lyrics like “Come join us / Yes, I am one of you now” accompanied by pseudo-eerie noises (presumably a reference to the infamous Heaven’s Gate cult), seem pretentiously silly. Stuck in the limbo between happy shout-along tunes and pre-millennial musings, these tracks are neither camp enough nor deep enough - they just jar.
It is the preponderance of those jarring moments that ultimately prevent the album from approaching anything like greatness. Sporadic glimpses of brilliance abound, and other DJs will have a field day raiding the album for samples, but as a complete album, this is less manifesto and more inchoate statement. Like, totally bogus, mate.