Fear Of Fours - Lamb

While there's always a place for boy bands and diva dollies, macho rock and riot girls, for lad anthems and ladies' night disco tracks, and for chauvinistic rap and bitchcore hip-hop, it has to be said that sometimes it's good to stop the sex wars. Sometimes, it's not just nice to hear the boys and girls working together – it's utterly inspiring. The dynamic between male and female, whether it's sexual or platonic, has been a driving force behind ...
...best art right across the spectrum – that sometimes it's easy to forget just how good it can be when XX and XY work together on equal terms.

So it is with Andy Barlow and Louise Rhodes, who may refer to each other as 'Cosmic bro' and 'Spiritual sis' in the liner notes of their albums (or at least, when they're not having tiffs of the 'artistic friction' kind, as they are rumoured oft to do), but are collectively known as Lamb. While ... more

While there's always a place for boy bands and diva dollies, macho rock and riot girls, for lad anthems and ladies' night disco tracks, and for chauvinistic rap and bitchcore hip-hop, it has to be said that sometimes it's good to stop the sex wars. Sometimes, it's not just nice to hear the boys and girls working together – it's utterly inspiring. The dynamic between male and female, whether it's sexual or platonic, has been a driving force behind so much of our best music – in fact, our best art right across the spectrum – that sometimes it's easy to forget just how good it can be when XX and XY work together on equal terms.

So it is with Andy Barlow and Louise Rhodes, who may refer to each other as 'Cosmic bro' and 'Spiritual sis' in the liner notes of their albums (or at least, when they're not having tiffs of the 'artistic friction' kind, as they are rumoured oft to do), but are collectively known as Lamb. While it's easy to lump them in with a lot of other boy-girl electronic/trip-hop acts that seemed to spring up in the last six or so years (Goldfrapp, Moloko, Hooverphonic), they set themselves apart a little. They have the standard set-up of male-programmed music and female vocals, but their music seems a little less postured, a little more soulful and a little more capable of combining male and female into something resolutely human than their contemporaries' compositions.

Lamb formed in Manchester in and released 'Fear of Fours', their second album, in 1999. It comprises fourteen tracks of what could loosely be termed "trip-hop" and is generally found in the dance record section of your local HMV, but tends to do so much more than it says on the tin, having more in common with the broken beats and string arrangements of Portishead than the disco stylings of classic Moloko or Goldfrapp.

The album begins with a whisper, not a bang – 'Soft Mistake', a gentle swell of eerie keyboard and echoey chimes overlaid with a double bass refrain and no vocal; the kind of composition that makes Lamb and acts like them a favourite with those who choose the music for TV ads and incidental film backing tracks. It fades out as it faded in, and the silence is shattered by the four sudden, deep synth notes that signify the intro to "Little Things", a fast off-tempo track with a hectic drum-n-bass beat and our first taste of Lou Rhodes' honeyed voice: "There's so many things that we miss in our everyday lives,/ We're so busy hustling, bustling, chasing far away dreams,/ We forget the little things…" This is their ode to how we "forget to live" instead of having "eyes like children so we live each day like our first" – not the point of view you'd expect from an electronic act singing over such a low and dirty bassline. They are supreme electronic artists and yet they are not drawn into the toxically modern lifestyle that suggests, not even in the stance of their music – no personality cults, award ceremonies, drugs or similar. Maybe it's because they concentrate lyrically on such 'little', everyday things – life, love, family – but elevate them til they're the epitome of all that is beautiful and good, that Lamb have such a warm and human feel to them, even when the music itself is all made of synthethised sound and dance-y drum beats.

We see it again and again in these songs. "B-Line" is a crazed construction of jazz-song-gone-mental about the simple way the singer's lover moves and how her heart turns cartwheels "every time you walk in the room". "All in Your Hands" tells the story of finally trusting someone enough to be in love with them; it builds and builds into a chorus as musically glorious and huge as the Bjork song "Play Dead", and the sex it implies is a connection that's intimate and gorgeous, not cold and calculating like it might be on Goldfrapp's uber-seductive "Black Cherry". On "Bonfire", again set over strongs and electronica, Lou asks in a plaintive verse: "Have you ever wondered why those days exist,/ When life just seems to be a conspiracy against you?" and answers herself with a huge, bloody-minded, life-affirming chorus of advice: "Just burn like a good bonfire / In whatever you do,/ Burn like a good bonfire / and I know you'll come through…" They offer simplicity as a solution in words over music that is complex, and the result is inspiringly resonant.

Great as those tracks are, there are two I have to claim as favourites. The first is "Softly", the track with which I was introduced to Lamb on a mix CD by a friend.It combines a pared-down double bass with Lou's slippery smooth vocal and underscores it with the simple refrain of "So happy with you", uttered by an ethereally beautiful choir of angelic voices. "This moment – what could be more precious?/ Made me forever, made me forever / So happy with you…" Lou sings. It's like a jazz torch song but not based around heartbreak; a quiet affirmation of what it is to be absolutely happy in love; and one of the most silky and exquisite love songs I've heard in quite some time.

The other is "Alien", a song that actually gave me shivers from the very first time I heard it. It's composed in honour of Lou's pregnancy, a kind of ante-natal tribute to her unborn child – but gone are the gentle strings and the soft instrumentals. Instead, it's the most chaotic song on the album. It begins with an eerie, atonal synth drone and a quiet beat that's somewhere between the rhythm of a heart and rhythm of heavy machinery. "This was a body," she sings, "Now it's a home,/ For you, little alien,/ I feel you moving,/ it's awesome strange…" The music is brooding and dangerous, the beat mechanical and harsh, and the harmony Lou twins to her own vocal melody is strange and startling but still creepily smooth. "And I've found a happy home," she sings in the weird dual voice. "What's it like in there?/ Yeah, I found a happy home,/ I hope it's cosy in there…" The overall effect has to be heard to be appreciated. The song is so offbeat, so not what you'd expect, that it's almost stunning. I love the way it manages to pay tribute to the awe of giving life without descending into cliché – in fact, maybe it conveys the mixture of wonder and weirdness better than a thousand other songs that have tried to honour the birth of a new child.

The artwork on the CD is fairly fitting in general. There is a standard shot of the artists themselves – dressed in plain black shirts, facing the camera side by side standing in front of a lake and mountains – and the rest is mostly 'art' shots – a blurred hand, abstract images, cut and pasted montages. I like it all except the fron cover of the album itself, which looks somehow amateurish. It's plain black, with the Lamb logo and album title (no, I'm not sure why anyone should be afraid of Fours either…) and a treated photo of the twosome made into a cross between a yellowish silhouette and a negative. Which is fine, except the whole thing looks kind of off-balance because of a large and inexplicable yellow hexagon shape next to them. Highly down to personal taste of course, but it certainly doesn't please my eye and I think they could've done a lot better.

But that aside, there are basically no weak tracks on this album, and the strong tracks are strong beyond belief. Lamb have made several more albums since, but this is certainly my favourite of the bunch. It is a perfect introduction to them and a beautiful album in its own right. The way Barlow and Rhodes compliment each other's contributions to each song is an illustration of everything that fits together neatly about male and female artistry, even when they have to fight to get it right. Bored of the same old music, day after day? Bring your plate over here and help yourself to a piece of Lamb – you'll not be disappointed.
 

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