God First would like to be judged by its front and back cover. Given its playful, soul-boutique image and impressive list of guest vocalists, Mr. Jukes cuts an immediately likable image for a producer/curator—enigmatic but impeccably connected, a locus for funk, old-school R&B, golden age hip-hop, and modern pop. If all of this suggests a up-and-coming, Mark Ronson-style polyglot, take advantage of the first two minutes of God First. Because after the queasy orchestration of the opening “Typhoon” gets its sea legs, Jack Steadman’s vocals come in and, oh right, this is the guy from Bombay Bicycle Club.
This drastic rebrand shouldn’t come as a surprise. Since emerging as teenage festival-folkers nearly a decade ago, Bombay Bicycle Club spent the first half of their run accumulating commercial goodwill they would subsequently gamble on increasingly bold artistic shifts. This is all relative: they’re not exactly Talk Talk or Radiohead, but there’s a sizable difference between the “quiet is the new loud” retread Flaws and turnt up-is-the-better-loud So Long, See You Tomorrow, which maintained the band’s Patsavas-core framework within EDM razzle dazzle. Steadman’s new style doesn’t really feel risky either since his trajectory from acoustic-toter to soul crate-digger is encouraged every month by basically every single men’s magazine in existence.
The fundamental irony here is that Steadman sounds far more conservative in his new role. Albums of this type usually tend to feature risk-averse writing anyway, resetting itself with every guest vocalist despite staying firmly within the realm of professionally sung relationship vaguebooking. While a capable producer, Steadman isn’t yet a confident one, never pushing the luminaries to do anything other than the exact thing one would expect from them. With all due respect, “Grant Green” is the kind of rafter-reaching Charles Bradley could do on cue, while Steadman’s shellacked samples provide him an Animatronic version of the Extraordinaires as backup. The cluttered De La Soul/Horace Andy feature “Leap of Faith” has more in common with his track-stuffing on So Long than actual hip-hop production meant to facilitate flow. He attempts the density of Prince Paul without any of the depth or dexterity—plus De La sounds like they’re saving the primo material in case there’s another Gorillaz album.
The discrepancy between Steadman’s skill set and the kind of music he’s trying to make here is hard to overlook: “Angels Your Love” is a sampledelic tapestry modeled after the Avalanches, albeit with a much lower thread count. Steadman loves his breakbeats, but isn’t willing to get his fingers dusty—God First’s safe place is a spirited boom-bap whose non-quantized, chunky drums still manage to sound rigid as an 808 and as clean as any Bombay Bicycle Club record. Hell, even the Steadman solo features (“Ruby”, “Typhoon”) would’ve passed for maybe the eighth or ninth most adventurous tracks on So Long. If you’re a former Brit-popper who can wrangle Charles Bradley, Horace Andy, BJ the Chicago Kid, Lalah Hathaway, and De La Soul onto your album and you’re not Damon Albarn, you do it and figure out the rest later. Perhaps the next Mr. Jukes project will find Steadman willing to show us his soul, but for now he’s only comfortable showing us his record collection.
