MJ Cole and Artful Dodger want to make you do just that. With its dazzling production values, jazzy arrangements, champagne-smooth vocals and hypersyncopated rhythms,
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Cole's
Sincere has got to be the most luxurious black sound since Soul II Soul - and it's a whole lot faster. Artful Dodger's
It's All About the Stragglers goes even heavier on the hooks, thanks to a succession of sharp singers and Jamaican rappers, while jacking up the beats-per-minute.
The catch is that Cole and Artful Dodger's Mark Hill and Pete Devereux don't spring from the ghettos of the Dirty South. They're ex-ravers, middle-class white Londoners with classical-music backgrounds who found a common ground where their skills and interests could talk to each other. And they're decidedly not bling-bling - although their music, known back home as two-step or U.K. garage, sure is. The leaders of England's latest dance movement, Cole and Artful Dodger sandwich together house music's hedonistic rush, contemporary R&B's nervous syncopation, reggae's low-end rumble and drum-and-bass's pitch-altering mechanics in one booty-shaking package. Unlike the Eurocentric purity of trance, two-step splices global black expressions into a boom-time celebration of multiracial Britain that's as earthy as it is technologically grounded and, accordingly, packed with contradictions.
Nurtured by British pirate-radio stations and fueled by bedroom-bootleg remixes of accelerated R&B hits, two-step honors sonic sophistication even as it indulges illicit pleasures. As with most U.K. trends, its roots are in underground clubs and alternative night life, yet its up-tempo, upwardly mobile grooves dominate pop airwaves. British critics nominated Cole's Sincere for their indie-minded Mercury Prize, while Artful Dodger's improbably titled breakthrough, "Re-Rewind the Crowd Say Bo Selecta," introduced singer Craig David, a teen heartthrob tipped to become England's biggest R&B export since Sade, and kicked off an unbroken string of five U.K. hits.
The acoustic guitars, horns and pianos of Sincere float through a digital rain forest dense with ornate harmonies, uncommon chords and stop-start dynamics. Like a mix tape of mixed emotions, with its fusion of pristine softness and hard pumping, Sincere creates a complex tension that calls out for repeated listenings. Upstart diva Elisabeth Troy supplies sultry vocal musings, while beatless interludes
