The fact that Bullion-- aka west London producer Nathan Jenkins-- is able to throw a curveball shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, he's the man who combined Pet Sounds and the music of J Dilla to entirely non-terrible effect. Four-and-a-half years after his first material appeared, though, he still hasn't put out a proper debut album, instead darting around releasing unpredictable EPs and the odd single on different carefully curated labels. The Canterbury Mix, which preceded the 2010 EP You Drive Me to Plastic, contained psych-folk strains from the likes of Caravan, Gong, and Robert Wyatt, which didn't particularly manifest itself on the release it heralded. On the Love Me Oh Please Love Me EP, however, Jenkins includes a stringed, aridly dubby cover of Wyatt's "The Age of Self", which curiously lends the collection a modern sentiment: "There's people doing frightfully well, there's others on the shelf/ But never mind the second kind, this is the age of self." It's basically as detached a sneer at the 1% as it's possible to muster.
That's really the only point at which Jenkins' voice rises above the parapet, even on a frequently vocal-led EP. You could allude to a sense of hopelessness in the repetitive refrains of "It's All in Sound", a reserved drone with a Caribou-like itch that spirals into a spectacular saxophone solo. However, Jenkins' templated vocals are one of the EP's weaker links. Here, the pattern is "Thinking up and thinking down/ Whichever way around, it's all in sound/ Walk back and sideways too/ Whichever way you like." The Badalamenti-heavy pads and chipping woodblocks of "Collision" couch awkward verses ("I feel het up/ There is no let up") that slowly accelerate towards a more graceful rhyme: "My vision/ And your vision/ It's a collision." "Keep a Document" urges capturing moments in order to "Watch mum smile again/ She's a child again/ Times are wild again." These blocky verses unnecessarily affect a false and mildly contrived style in what's largely a very fluid EP.
The beginning of the penultimate song, "Family", feels like an Atlas Sound track getting suffocated not by digital crackle, the way that Bradford Cox's material under that moniker often goes, but by taut, ephemeral 1980s synth pop. It's an odd combination that somehow works, the two strains looming over each other throughout until they combine into a luscious harp bounce woven through by bursts of harmonica. "Save Your Lubb" starts off sounding like the rhythm section from Kelis' "Millionaire", and winds from being a light beach-side frolic to a kind of space-age prairie trek, all heavy crevices, strange lunar washes, and widescreen haunt. Unsurprisingly, Jenkins has a knack of leading the listener on a peculiar trajectory, although it often turns out to be a fun wild goose chase. As a whole, Love Me Oh Please Love Me slows from an agitated funk to a dry, Oriental-inflected slump over the course of its six songs, and aside from the odd foreboding draught of reverb, it lacks the freakiness of You Drive Me to Plastic. In that sense, Love Me feels no closer to elucidating what might go on when Bullion finally releases an LP, but it tantalizingly adds to the pot.
