Albums

Album Review: Pendulum

[Album: In Silico]
[Label: WEA]

Let’s get this clear from the off. I absolutely loved Brit-based, Australian-born Pendulum’s debut album, ‘Hold Your Colour’. It swept drum n’ bass into my sordid, murky world of heavy rock and mangled metal like a blast of fresh air. It had me and my mates whirling in circles repeatedly around our local club dancefloors as it probably did others in clubs up and down our fair isle. It wasn’t just the high-octane speed of ‘Fasten Your Seatbelt’ but also the grime n’ groove of ‘Tarantula’ that sent us into raptures. Pendulum brought an accessibility to the genre that no-one had done before and it slayed.

Now, with ‘In Silico’ they seem determined to take their knack for crossing genres one step forward and as you can tell with their recent top ten track ‘Propane Nightmares’ they have hit their target. It’s not my cup of tea with its pasty pop sensibilities, but considering everything that has gone before I should be the first to raise my hands up in submission. However, it seems I’m not the only one who thinks the band have overstepped the mark with many ridiculing its staid-sounding, over-produced assuredness quoting old Apollo 440 and Prodigy tracks as the guidebook to the new sound.

Yet, ‘In Silico’ has verve, drive, punch and power in spades. It takes hooks and pounds them repeatedly into your brain. It burns brightest when it’s expected and tails off into a synthetic, interweaving fragility when the track starts to pound too hard. Perhaps, therein lays the problem. This is what you’d call the notorious difficult second album when a band needs to reproduce what has gone before without sounding dated; in other words to surprise the listener. In a way they’ve succeeded by producing something truly uninspiring; a set of soundtrack-friendly, chart-bothering tracks.

‘Midnight Runner’ and ‘9,000 Miles’ are the closest they get to finding a happy medium of originality and substance. Both invigorate with a bubbling purity, a structure that warps slowly setting them significantly apart from their brothers who lack anything like the breath-taking freshness that each has. The former has any number of pattern changes, each full of churning passion and class-riddled complexity. The latter is subtle, yet sturdy; replete with crunch, tang and bite - damn it tastes good.

I am in no doubt that the album will divide fans up and down the country and, since the band is hitting America hard with it, even globally. Pendulum are set to become huge by taking the drum n’ bass genre closer to the mainstream than ever before. In doing so there is no doubt they’ll dilute the template, as they have already, but whether they alienate more fans than they generate is for them to decide, and them alone.

For fans of: Apollo 440, The Prodigy, DJ Fresh
Band links = Pendulum

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Tags: album, cd, Pendulum, In Silico, review

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