High Contrast - Notes From The Underground (2020)

There was the general perception from those who were listening to High Contrast in the early 21st century that the quality of his music had gone downhill and he was making it for the kids.

I get the feeling this album was a reaction to that. Overall it feels like more of an old skool rave album than a drum & bass one. The cover suggests it, as does the first actual tune with the name "Windows 95".

It get's off to a good start and I enjoy the old skool feel to it. Not so keen on "Time Is Hardcore" though, more the irritating vocals on it than anything. That's just a blip though and the album quickly redeems itself with "Met Her At A Dance In Leicester".

On his previous album when he started experimenting he was getting to far away from drum & bass really and it didn't work. It sounds like he's trying to experiment here but keeping closer to drum & bass and having the right sort of tempo to his music.

I must admit though I did start losing interest towards the end of the album. Not that the tunes were particularly bad, I'm probably just getting a shorter attention span like a lot of people are these days.

There's a lot of awful commercial drum & bass these days and given High Contrast is big enough to do gigs in his own right it's easy to lump him in with that. In reality he's nowhere near that bad and still has some genuinely decent tunes left in him.

 

High Contrast - Night Gallery (2017)

The High Contrast album I picked in my favourite albums was "High Society" from 2004. Drum & Bass had always been more for the dancefloor than the home but this was just about the most home friendly drum & bass album I'd heard.

The "Night Gallery" album came out around the time High Contrast started doing gigs in his own right rather than being part of a wider line up. I was there for that first gig in London and then saw him again a year or so later. I therefore got very familiar with this album at the time.

Over the last decade or so the demographic of the gigs I've been too generally speaking have been of the older variety. I had the theory that High Contrast fans were getting on a bit and would rather go to a gig than an all night rave, at least that's how I saw myself. After all it had been 15 years since his debut album and he'd been on the DJ circuit for longer.

When I turned up to the gig though I felt like I was just about the oldest person there, I couldn't believe just how young the crowd were. That said, many on the internet say High Contrast is a sellout or not as good as he used to be. He's making music for the kids basically.

To the album then and I must confess I've not listened to it for some time. It's got a decent intro that leads into the 2nd track "Remind Me" which is one I like. The following track "Questions" is decent too.

Then it starts getting a little bit experimental and that's where it starts to go wrong. Once we get to "The Beat Don’t Feel The Same" we're very much out of drum & bass territory. Whilst branching out into other styles is no bad thing, it doesn't really work for me here.

It's back to form with "Love On A 45" but then it's back to the experimental tunes. The album never really recovers after that truth be told. I thought one of the later tracks was decent enough but not worth sitting through the tunes that precede it for.

Overall it's a poor album with a couple of highlights and it tells me that perhaps High Contrast should just stick to what he knows i.e. drum & bass.

 

Last 10 Years

Yesterdays post about Fenech-Soler brought back memories of other music I was listening to when I first discovered them. Basically I didn't think I was old enough to reach the 'better in the old days' stage of my life and made an effort to keep my music tastes current.

One thing I did was pick my 25 favourite albums. It was a very biased list favouring the more recent albums though, 17 of them were from the 21st century and the other 8 were from the 90s. It also included an album which had only just come out at the time.

Nowadays I'm at a point where I'm not even up to date with a lot of artists I've liked in years gone by. Some went to to make some truly dreadful music and others I just forgot about. I do sometimes seek out new music from an artist if I'm going to see them in concert, but many don't really bother making new music anymore and stick to the classics.

It got me thinking, what albums have the 25 artists of those albums I picked released in the last 10 years. Well here's the answer:

2 Many DJs - No albums

Norman Jay - 2 albums: Skank & Boogie (2015), Mister Good Times (2017)

Portishead - No albums

Massive Attack - No albums

High Contrast - 2 albums: Night Gallery (2017), Notes from the Underground (2020)

Plump DJs - No albums

Jacques Lu Cont - No albums

Erol Alkan - 1 album: Fabriclive 77 (2014)

Spiritcatcher - No albums

Various Artists - N/A

DJ Shadow - 2 albums: The Mountain Will Fall (2016), Our Pathetic Age (2019)

Tiga - 1 album: No Fantasy Required  (2016)

Air - No albums

Fatboy Slim - No albums

Sander Kleinenberg - No albums

Snoop Dogg - 6 albums: Bush (2015), Coolaid (2016), Neva Left (2017), Bible of Love (2018), I Wanna Thank Me (2019), From tha Streets 2 tha Suites (2021), BODR (2022)

Jurassic 5 - No albums

Kruder & Dorfmeister - 1 album: Johnson (2022)

Zero 7 - No albums

Mylo - No albums

Digitalism - 2 albums: Mirage (2016), JPEG (2019)

Underworld - 2 albums: Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future (2016), Drift Series 1 (2019)

LCD Soundsystem - 1 album: American Dream (2017)

London Elektricity - 2 albums: Are We There Yet? (2015), Building Better Worlds (2019)

Propellerheads - No albums

Just 11 of the artists have released an album in the last 10 years and only 3 of them have released one in the decade so far. Only Snoop Dogg has been prolific with none of the others managing more than 2 albums in a decade.

This leads to another question, are these albums any good?

Just one way to find out. I'm going to give each of those albums a listen and post what I think of them here.

My 25 Favourite Albums: High Contrast - High Society

When I first got into rave music in the mid-90s it was around the same time it split into Happy Hardcore and Drum & Bass, yet it was what I knew to be the "rave sound" that got me into the music rather than either of those genres.

As the years went on, both genres in my mind were moving further away from that "rave sound". Happy Hardcore became basically faster Clubland music and Drum & Bass seemed more of an Urban genre than Dance.

My preferred genre in the 90s was Happy Hardcore, but by the early-00s I was listening to more Urban music so started to prefer Drum & Bass out of the 2, but was more into Rap and R&B.

By 2004 I was getting more into Dance music again. My view was Happy Hardcore was good for the fast tempos with harmonies, and Drum & Bass was good for the drums and the bass.

Then I heard "Racing Green" by High Contrast. It was like the tune I had been waiting for since the 90s had finally arrived. Instead of choosing between the harmony or the beat, you could now have both.

High Contrast was a name who had started to appear at events like Accelerated Culture and Slammin Vinyl in the early-00s but that's all I really knew about him. Then one day I was browsing at the record shop and found this particular album which had "Racing Green" on it and I bought it.

It begins with "Lovesick" and from the off you can tell that the harmonies of "Racing Green" weren't a one off, more so when the breakdown begins and once the beat kicks in I knew this would be a gem of an album.

Then you have "Tutti Frutti" which sounds like it has some LTJ Bukem influences in there, then comes the title track which features Dynamite MC from Reprazent which is followed by "Brief Encounter", another excellent track. The tune that made me purchase this album is next, so far I like every track and mean really like.

According to the track list on the back of the CD, "Natural High" is next. However it's in fact "Angels And Fly" that follows which I find rather irritating if I'm honest, but I guess no album is perfect. "Natural High" does comes next and we're back to form again.

Next up is "The Persistence Of Memory" which is a bit more like your regular Drum & Bass tune, I don't know if it uses the same sample as "Valley of the Shadows" by Origin Unknown but it has the phrase "31 seconds" in it. Then it's "Twilights Last Gleaming", which if you've ever seen High Contrast play you'll know, it's the "have you heard" one.

There's a bit of Reggae influence next in "Only Two Can Play" which features Spoonface. The final official track is "Yesterday's Colours" which is probably more suitable for home listening than the dancefloor, although you still have the breakbeats it's more mellow sounding.

We end with a bonus track called "The Basement Track" which sounds a bit like a Drum & Bass version of "The Launch" by DJ Jean, though there's more to it than just sounding like a blatant rip off.

There often comes a time where fans of a genre will say it's not as good as it used to be. I first got into rave in 1994, this was 10 years later. In the case of Happy Hardcore, I liked some of the new material at the time but didn't think any of it was anywhere near as good as it was in the mid-90s. In the case of Drum & Bass though, I thought this album was better than any of the Drum & Bass I listened to in the 90s, that's how much I like this album.

High Contrast @ Electric Ballroom

Those of you who heard me on Popmaster on Thursday will know that last night I went to see High Contrast at the Electric Ballroom last night. This was the second time I'd seen him live though I'd seen him DJ previously. It was actually just over a year ago when I saw him do his first live show in London, I misremembered it as being 2016 when I mentioned it on the radio.

One of the notable differences between seeing him live and seeing him DJ is that you don't have to stay up all night to see him which suits someone of my age. That said, there seemed to be plenty of schoolchildren there who were probably 25 in reality.

One thing I remember from last time was that he arrived on stage early, this time I looked at my watch when he arrived on stage, not as early as before but was 20:28 when his stage time was 20:30, if only all live performers could be like this.

He began with "Love On A 45" from his latest album which is one of my favourites from his new album and a good choice to start with. Then came the classics "Racing Green" and "Basement Track" from his excellent "High Society" album.

Next up came his Drum & Bass take on "Tobacco Road" by the Nashville Teens from his latest album. He then did one of the non-Drum & Bass tracks from his new album "I Get High".

Other tunes which followed included a Drum & Bass remix of "Shotgun Mouthwash" from the Trainspotting 2 film, "If We Ever" where he paid tribute to the late Diane Charlemagne who originally provided vocals, a new 2018 track and another non-Drum & Bass track from his new album, the appropriately titled "The Beat Don't Feel the Same" which evolved into a Drum & Bass remix.

We also had his remix of "Rez" by Underworld and then once again "The Road Goes On Forever" took the crowd up a gear. He then played "Twilight's Last Gleaming" which his said was one of his favourites which would explain why I don't think I've ever seen a High Contrast set where he hasn't played it.

He finished off with "Questions" from the new album, "How Love Begins" which was his collaboration with DJ Fresh and finally "Remind Me" from his latest album.

The gig was over by 21:45 and I was home just after 22:30 which is early for any gig let alone someone you could only previously see in the early hours.

It was a top performance and at just £12.50 a ticket it was a complete bargain considering the rip off prices some people charge these days.

High Contrast @ Electric

As a dance music fan who works a 9 to 5 and isn't as young as I used to be, it's somewhat an inconvenience these days that the only way I can see many dance music acts is to spend all night at a club. That's precisely what I've done when I've seen High Contrast in the past.

I was therefore pleased to hear that High Contrast was to play his first live show last night, meaning not only getting to see something a little different from the norm but also being able to see High Contrast without having to struggle through next week at work because of a sleep deficit.

He actually appeared on stage earlier than the advertised time, the first time I can ever recall that happening at a gig I've been to. He was joined on stage with a guitarist and drummer and some rotating vocalists. The first tune he played was "Racing Green" from his excellent "High Society" album, quite possibly the best drum & bass album ever released.

Several of his tunes from over the years were played but the crowd stepped up a gear when he played "The Road Goes On Forever". Although it's been five years since his last album he's continued to make new music since me and has a new album coming out soon which looks quite promising.

A little over an hour later the set was over and I quite possibly left the venue earlier than I had arrived at the venue last time I saw him play.

Overall a top night, here's hoping this is the first of many live gigs that he does.