Matthew Herbert debuted his first opera earlier this year, which, in typically perverse fashion, encouraged audience members to leave their cell phones on during the performance. It followed a flurry of activity in 2013, including the release of The End of Silence, an album structured around a sample of a plane dropping a bomb on Libya, and a 130-track box set of the house oriented material he’s released as Herbert. Regarding the latter, it felt like a typically obtuse move to take arguably his most accessible work and turn it into a test of stamina. But at this point in his career there are few surprises from Herbert, to say the least. On Part 6, a follow-up to his Part 1-5 series from the mid 90s, he strips out all the conceptual horseplay and follows a relatively smooth path. It’s hard to know whether it’s a confounding turn or a logical one. Somehow, it feels like both those things at the same time.
Nothing is ever played totally straight in Herbert’s world. He steadily works through styles over the four tracks on this EP, looping in strands of downtempo house, soul, funk, and acid house. It’s unabashedly retro in its trimmings, although like most Herbert releases, he always throws in elements that stop his audience from fully getting their bearings. “Grab That Bottle” may initially appear to be a direct march into blocky machine noise, but it evolves into something far more playful and light. In those moments Herbert reaches a point Richard D. James sometimes aims for, somewhere between beauty and humor, like a bird pooping in your eye as you marvel at a spectacular sunset. Herbert’s career is full of such moments, but he’s managed to keep it fresh despite the enormous amount of releases under his belt, largely because of how well he executes the barrage of ideas charging through his mind.
Herbert specializes in tracks that pull you in with surface level fixtures, only to reveal greater depth once you’re two or three plays in. “My DJ” appears to be a light dance groove spun under a pitch-shifted vocal snippet, but dig deeper and there’s a far greater intricacy to it, with its repetitive piston-like rhythms resembling hundreds of tiny pieces of factory equipment all working in tandem. “Manny” works in the same way, only getting prettier and more inviting if you go the long haul with it, as its strings of dovetailing vocal samples open up to reveal a deeper level of complexity. Both tracks form a useful parallel to Herbert’s overall career, where most of his projects come bearing overarching concepts that come off as inspiring or insipid, and generally find a greater weight when you strip away a few layers of theoretical decoration. Those details are important, of course, but often only parts that build toward the greater whole.
Herbert's popularity has likely peaked, but the thought of him rising up as a contemporary Bill Drummond-type figure is certainly an intriguing proposition. The opening “One Two Three” from Part 6 isn’t without its commercial charms, especially in the vocal from Rahel of the London-based Hejira. It’s perfect twilight-hours house, with Herbert mostly quashing the need to meddle and going straight down the line with a set of dimly-lit rhythms. Still, as with most of his material, it’s hard to imagine this getting play almost anywhere outside his cult, perhaps unfairly. On “One Two Three” he’s somewhere close to the song oriented material that lit up his excellent work with Róisín Murphy on Ruby Blue, where he instinctively knew when to pull back from the brink. Here, Herbert’s somewhere between his avant and commercial selves, allowing two contrasting parts of his brain to feed off one another instead of going into all-out attack mode.
