There are 50 ways to leave your lover, and Daedelus (aka Los Angeles-based electronic composer and trained jazz man Alfred Weisberg-Roberts) wants to sell you 15 more. Love to Make Music To, his ninth album since 2002's Invention and first on Ninja Tune explores love and lust in all their facets, but never quite gets there.
LTMMT's global shortcoming is a catalogue of micro-errors: the clashing of chintzy, tip-glass pianos and chattering hi-hats that make "Get Off Your HiHats" sounds like a castoff from a mid-90s car racing game; a vanishing bassline that tosses wincingly bad verses from Paperboy and Taz into the naked foreground of "Touchtone"; "Drummery Jam" and its timbre-muddling shifts from 808s to yet another chintzy piano loop; the X-ed out lounge ballad "I Car(ry) Us" leading off with a female voice whispering "I'm so high!"; the woeful song titles; the tourette-esque shifts in mood and timbre; the goofy album cover. Daedelus may be productive and talented (peep his Throw a Fit EP), this album's lack of cohesion lumps it in with any one of a thousand amorphous DJ mixes.
The real pain is just how gamely LTMMT tries to show a heart. Album-opening "Fair Weather Friends" trots out a coy PSA vocal sample over modest handclaps: "You know, when the weather gets warm, we get the same things on our minds as you boys do!" Message received. The sound and sentiments keep piling and piling, but the fun keeps draining and draining.
It's not that Weisberg-Roberts has the wrong idea. Labelmate Ghislain Poirier tried, and fully succeeded, in grafting general concern with airy electronic earlier this year with No Ground Under, an album as sly with its globalization and political bones as LTMMT is ham-fisted in romance. The difference? There is nothing meticulous about LTMMT, which loses shape in sloppy transitions, sacrificing landscape and pacing for an eager-to-please ADD. Daedelus does ocassionally display some focus: A simple backbone of bells and chants float "You're the One" along a breezy mid-tempo draft; "Only for the Heart Strings" works a buzzing, hornet-nest synthesizer over hi-hats.
Prefuse 73's haunting, sonically fragmented break-up epic One Word Extinguisher is the platinum standard for abstract hip-hop producers embracing emotion, and while Daedelus' LTMMT is aiming for a more southern latitude (hips and areas south) than Extinguisher, it is impossible to ignore just how ragged this sounds held next to any one of a dozen of other electronic albums shooting for the same conceptual stars. Talent levels have little to do with it. Weisberg-Roberts has made fine, thoughtful albums before. He'll do so again. What is at stake is the old adage from Faulkner on editing, "kill your darlings." Had Weisberg-Roberts edited closer, trimmed neater, and not given every move and twist a internal gold star, then LTMMT might have been a more complete record.
