At what point does a hip-hop producer decide to lean towards live instrumentation? Is it something that comes up after years of sample-searching, where months upon months' worth of listening hours and beat dismantling spur a fascination with the original soul or jazz product via reverse-engineering osmosis? Or is it just a growing disenchantment with the idea of plugging away at ProTools? Whatever the motivation, Ninja Tune's longtime resident hip-hop geeks Ollie Teeba and Jake Wherry-- better known as the Herbaliser-- took a gradual but noticeable shift into live-band dynamics over the course of their decade-and-a-half career, solidifying their current incarnation of horn-driven pop-funk bombast on 2005's Take London and finding themselves right at the center of the nu-Swingin' London retro-soul maelstrom that Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse belatedly became the faces of.
It's an interesting place for the Herbaliser to wind up, but it's also a perilous one: as one of the more straightforward and unassuming groups to come out of the otherwise avant-blunted mid-late 1990s Ninja Tune camp, their sense of populist feel-goodery only gets more lapel-grabbingly eager-to-please when you factor in blaring brass and Nixon-age demi-kitsch. Like Take London, there's some points on their first post-Ninja Tune release, Same As It Never Was, that threaten to suffocate you in a chortling wave of self-aware schmaltz, like some kind of Mike Myers version of Lalo Schifrin or the John Barry Orchestra. Dopey genre-film-score homages like the cop-show lite-funk clichés of "Blackwater Drive" or the bumbling Benny Hill mugging of "Amores Bongo" don't radiate much excitement or smarts -- sure, they're kind of funny-ha-ha, but ultimately frivolous and cheesy enough to damage initial impressions of what would otherwise be a well-assembled work of inoffensively likeable pop-funk revivalism.
Fortunately, those moments are just speed bumps, and better failed levity than failed grandiosity anyways. When Jake, Ollie, and the Easy Access Orchestra horn section (Andrew Ross and Ralph Lamb) consolidate their efforts into less goofy turf, they come across like a solid set of compatriots to your typical Daptone Records band, sporting a chameleonic modular-soul versatility that doesn't strain too hard to fit into hip-hop turf. Whenever they're playing behind a vocalist, which they do for the majority of the record, they stick to providing a solid backbone and let all the attention focus on whoever's got the mic. So you get Jean Grae, who goes back with the Herbaliser over a decade, fitting a novella's (or a screenplay's) worth of fraternal betrayal and true-crime intricacy inside "Street Karma (A Cautionary Tale)"-- and suddenly the cop-show vibe that made "Blackwater Drive" come across sort of flippantly sounds a lot more intense this time around. And even if the epic-Western tone makes the bounce of "Just Won't Stop" sound a bit off, Yungun's sympathetic Luddite laments over YouTube culture and record-shop closings give it some gravity.
Then there's Jessica Darling, who appears on five of Same As It Never Was' twelve tracks and gives the album much of its character. A 22-year-old Londoner who sings a bit like a Southern U.S. r&b vet in her late fifties, it's kind of a disconnect to hear her go all Jean Knight on some assorted Mssrs. Big Stuff in "You're Not All That" or paraphrasing Smokey Robinson's lyrics for "Get Ready" on "Can't Help This Feeling". But the displacement in era and culture and continent aren't really what makes her voice surprisingly appealing-- she just sounds comfortably fierce and high-energy, a belter who's a little too raspy and rough for your more polite coffeehouses (though closer "Stranded on Earth" proves she can work chillout duty just fine). Even as the post-Winehouse fragmentation of nu-soul drops artists into bleached pockets of mannered, by-the-numbers nostalgia (have they green-lit The Commitments II yet?), Same As It Never Was at least risks something-- and when it's not tripping over its clownish go-go boots, it makes a good-enough case for going all the way live.
