Daedelus: Love To Make Music To
Ninja Tune

The latest missive from Alfred “Daedelus” Darlington is so high-energy, it verges on feverish. Intended as an homage to early UK rave culture, Love To Make Music To amounts to a fifty-five minute party jam spilling over with pulsating electro, hip-hop, and everything in between, and all of it stamped with the trademark Daedelus eccentricity we've come to expect. The album's playful spirit asserts itself immediately in the opener “Fair Weather Friends” when rollicking carousel melodies and raucous beats join hands with a prototypical Daedelus sample, a girl's protestation “You know when the weather gets warm / We get the same things on our minds as you boys do,” and the jubilant vibe carries on into the euphoric sing-along “Make It So.” Guests Michael Johnson, Laura Darlington, and rhyme-meisters N'fa and Sa-Ra's Paperboy and Taz climb aboard for the banging electro-rumble of “Twist the Kids” and “Bass in It” and charging electro-funk of “Get Off Your HiHats.” While Love To Make Music To features a goodly share of straight-up songs, it also includes requisite examples of patchwork madness, such as “Hrs:Mins:Secs” (a sampledelic nightmare come to life), “Assembly Lines,” “If We Should,” and the wacky acid-house cut “Drummery Jam.” In a couple of instances, Darlington wisely lets the listener catch a breath or two: in an arresting marriage of electro and bucolic balladry, “I Car(ry) Us” brings some comparatively gentle moments of melancholy to the proceedings, while the sweetly soulful vocals of chanteuse Erika Rose illuminate the electro-funk of “My Beau.” Anything but lugubrious, Love To Make Music To may well be Daedelus's most party-like collection to date.

August 2008