It's All About The Stragglers

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to describe UK garage genii Artful Dodger as the most exciting dance act to emerge since Orbital first got our jaws dropping back in the early 1990s. Welding state-of-the-art technology to a pure pop sensibility, the production duo of Mark Hill and Pete Devereux have racked up four blistering hit singles in a year.

It’s All About The Stragglers (no, me neither) aims squarely down the middle in concept and execution. Twelve tracks, none lasting longer than four and a half minutes, and nothing that you could describe as remotely balladic or experimental. The whole thing clocks in at under 50 minutes, which only adds to the punch of immediacy that it packs.

Hill and Devereux’s genius is their gift for making every element in a track work in tandem as melody, texture and rhythm. The beats are awesome, gleamingly futuristic swathes of pin-sharp snares and hi-hats, all cloaked in a smooooooth sheen of deluxe, fluorescised production.

‘Something’, a track which dates from ’98, virtually drowns in its own gorgeously deluxe textures of synth-plasma, and is easily the best thing here. Elsewhere, check out the arpeggiated harp-strings (yes, harp-strings!) of ‘I Can’t Give It Up’; the awesomely seductive groove of recent single ‘Woman Trouble’, in which the kick-drum pattern actually entwines itself around the bassline; or the gamelan-esque synth-droplets of ‘Twentyfourseven’.

All the 45s are here, too, including ‘Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)’, a tune which, unbelievably, still hasn’t been ruined by over-exposure. Meanwhile, ‘Woman Trouble’, featuring the marvellously hysterical Brit-soul vox of Robbie Craig, is still the single (and video) of the year.

What’s remarkable about this record is the sheer elasticity of what Hill and Devereux are doing, absorbing pop/R&B commercialism and still convincingly passing themselves off as “street”. Gorgeously iridescent, alluringly slinky, …Stragglers is virtually an instant classic.