- It's been said that in techno, the heroes never die. Turns out it's no different for legendary London group Blu Mar Ten either, who've been kicking around various sectors of drum & bass since the mid-'90s, flirting with mainstream success before becoming jack-of-all-trades hardliners in the past five or so years. Since their split with Good Looking almost a decade ago, Blu's newfound freedom has often led to sprawl, like 2009's excellent but overlong Natural History, and the theme continues with Love Is the Devil, which contains some of their most spirited and invigorated material yet.
You just have the patience to look for it: Devil is eighteen songs wide and over 90 minutes, so chances are you won't be sitting through the whole thing. While the album's sequencing is well-executed, moving from peak to valley back to peak with ease, it's a marathon listen, and you'll have as much luck jumping from track to track at random. Brimming with veteran confidence, the group jumps styles at a clip much more restless than the single-minded Natural History.
Devil's most exciting moments come when they interpret the shlocky midrange thrills of modern mainstream drum & bass. The downtempo title track is smeared with Hollywood widescreen soft focus, all M83-esque watery guitars and gated drums, while "Whisper"—angelic vocals courtesy of Kirsty Hawkshaw—feels like the aural approximation of gently sliding across ice, just slippery enough without feeling dangerous. Then there's a track like "Five Summers," which mixes summery classic rock crunch with a crisp quantized crack of a beat: it's an intoxicating upper which really drives home how much fun these guys can be while barely even trying.
I can't possibly cover all the bases that Blu Mar Ten do without making this review as unnecessarily long as the album, but there's bound to be a little nugget of something for everyone. They've got minimal minutiae covered with Stray collab "Blind Soul," hard-edged neurofunk with "Problem Child," and pop-dnb with any number of excellent vocal spots ("The Fourth," "Still the One"). The album's only weak moments come when the group's style-hopping lands them in particularly gimmicky territory—awkward jungle pastiche on "Made In London" or saccharine fairydust on "High Hopes"—but a few duds out of eighteen is still a pretty hard ratio to complain about.
More than anything else, Love Is the Devil is a reassertion of value, relevance and importance, that a dance outfit who've been around for almost twenty years can still make music that stands up to the fiercest wave of newcomers. If they had to make the album eighteen tracks long just to show us that they really can do almost everything well, so be it.
Tracklist 01. Into the light feat. Airwalker
02. All Thoughts Are Prayers
03. Blind Soul feat. Stray
04. Damage
05. Dive Summers
06. Blind Soul feat. INtrepid
07. The Beginning
08. Made In London
09. The Fourth feat. Jenni Potts
10. Another Year feat. Mike Lesirge
11. Problem Child
12. Love Is The Devil
13 .Sweet Little Supernova feat. Rochelle Parker
14 Hollow Men
15 Whisper feat. Kirsty Hawkshaw
16 Blue Skies
17 Still The One feat. InsideInfo
18 All Or Nothing