Ugly Side of Love
Malakai
Score:88
Reviewer: Ed Butler
Label: Invada Records (UK), Domino Records (USA & Australia)
Reviewed: Mar 17th '09, Released:2009
“There’s gonna be some trouble when it begins.” Opening lyrics to an album seldom come more solemn than the introduction to Ugly Side of Love. Yet, while thematically and lyrically Ugly Side of Love is possessed with a resolutely dystopian worldview, musically, it is the party that rings in the arrival of the four horsemen. A blend of scratches, samples, sixties pop, psychedelic rock, soul, breaks and beats, Malakai’s debut doesn't peddle in doom or gloom, but views the world with a pronounced lack of romanticism. Ugly Side of Love’s almost innumerable reference points defy easy categorization, but one thing is for sure: in their restless avoidance of the zeitgeist – or perhaps pursuit of it – Malakai have struck gold.
The easy description is simple: swinging, late sixties London anchored by elements of dub, breakbeat and hip-hop. But the deeper reality is more telling. Discovered by fellow Bristolian, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, Malakai represent a resurrection of sorts, because this is the new trip-hop. Whereas Portishead married a horror movie ethos to downbeat turntables, Malakai take the antiestablishment feel of war movies and literature like Full Metal Jacket and Catch-22 and inject it with a new take on what could easily have been a retreaded mess.
This is greatly aided by Scott Hardy and his use of samples. While the idea of sampling has almost reached the point of saturation for most of us, Hardy approaches the art with a subtlety that many of his contemporaries seem bereft of. Be it dialogue from war movies, sprinkled guitar, clinking crockery or a glorious (yet all-too-brief) combination and deconstruction of Radiohead’s ‘Like Spinning Plates’ and The Supremes’‘Sing a Simple Song’ on the curious closer ‘Simple Song’, Hardy is possessed of a deft hand and a keen ear.
Truly great debut albums are simultaneously rare and thrilling. They contain an unknown element that no established act can recapture and indeed, Ugly Side of Love offers something unique, for 2009 anyway. And, in their ingenious meshing of distinctly out-of-vogue sounds, Malakai have rebuilt trip-hop into a much more modern beast. More power to them for it.
