White Gold for House Lovers, Dross for Fashionistas
Robespierre | New York | 02/23/2007
(4 out of 5 stars)
"If you're looking for trend-coasting tracks to match the sounds in current clubs, then you'd best search elsewhere. But if you're more interested in owning the best of the genre than scoping fashionable material, then grab this milestone. Here's your chance to trace a gifted producer's art back to its purest and least self-conscious form. You'll get your money's worth and more from this 2-CD morsel fest.
Historically, Herbert appeared at a turning point in House evolution. The son of a BBC orchestra engineer, and a classically trained composer/arranger, he was the sort of producer who grew easily bored: the standard house blueprint was fun initially but quickly became stifling. He needed to change the rules constantly to maintain the excitement.
One unifying element in the Herbert sound has always been his patented surgical swing. It's a carefully orchestrated 4/4 broken into dotted eighth and sixteenth note triplets that emphasize the last beat of the pattern, with fills broken up into redistributed geeky bits: a sound that's far more polite than Aaron Funk's but is as identifiable an approach to house as Funk's is to jungle. Herbert anticipated microhouse by half a decade.
Herbert's rhythmic signature repeats in nearly all his work no matter how much the techniques and style might change.
Certain non-musician friends have characterized 100 lbs as being close to generic house. I disagree. The first two cuts verge on typical, but the musical thought is already too clean and pared for that. (The first cut, "Rude," is stiff but precociously organized.) And from the third track on ("Thinking of You"), Herbert begins to assert himself. By the fifth cut, "Friday, They Dance," his harmonic sense is fully developed. Check that two-chord harmonic progression (C79 - e-flat minor 7): It's one he uses in Around the House, Bodily Functions, Secondhand Sounds and most of his later work.
The so-called "datedness" is really a matter of the synth palette Herbert had to work with: the same Roland/Korg/ReBirth gear he and his peers had at the time. No use faulting him for that -- it was all anybody had.
Stiffness returns in "Pen," but the track is instructive as a kind of five-finger exercise. The discerning listener will recognize seven elements that make up the solo rhythm track. Once informed, listeners can either go home, recreate it, and set about gigging as Herbert cover acts, or gain new insight into music they loved a few years back.
The eponymous cut, "110 lbs," probably sounded semi-industrial to Herbert back in '96, hence the steampunk imagery on the original vinyl cover. Today it sounds like a charming percolator, and epitomizes the surgical lightness and assurance for which Herbert's known. It does, however, make use of the played-out "let's start with a closed filter and gradually open it!" effect popularized by Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus in the early 90s.
Other cuts, such as "Take Me Back," will take *you* back in a way this 90s artist couldn't have foreseen: They'll make you nostalgic for a future that never happened, where every urban landscape features a docked space station with a 24-hour club hub. As an incarnation of that feeling, "Deeper" is particularly tasty.
The bonus CD of rarities proves even more diverse. There's "back to the start," Herbert's progenitor of Amon Tobin's "Verbal." There's "back back back," the kernel that became Bodily Functions (and "let's all make mistakes," H's perfect mix CD for the Tresor series). There's the Atari/Commodore/909 robot-friendly "The Puzzle," which incorporates Herbert's micro-swing. There's the underwater Rhodes sound of "Fishcoteque," which also incorporates the pitch-wobbly fretless bass that became a staple of H's style. There's the virally catchy "I hadn't known." There's the '80s computer graphics cartoon jazz of "I'll Do It." There's even the shameless "Trafalgar Road," in which Herbert and a young Dani Siciliano reveal themselves to be a closet Kiki 'n' Herb: a piano bar duo with a repertoire of glitchy love songs.
Is this re-release worth picking up in 2007 and later? If you love House and don't hate time machines, the answer is yes, yes, yes."
Track Listings (11) - Disc #1