Having worked alongside Hot Chip/LCD Soundsystem legend Al Doyle on their first album, this time around they’ve borrowed his East London studio to self-produce their next offering.
The sentiment behind Laugh Like A Bomb is clear, with the phrase coming from an art manifesto discovered by Doherty while on tour, he instantly connected it to the sheer exhaustion they felt from constant weeks on the road. It evokes the state of emotional delirium which he would sometimes find himself in, with explosions of laughter being the end result, and lead single “Burn Me Out” further brings this feeling to life. There’s a recurring combination of bouncing basslines and programmed drumbeats throughout most of the album that captures a mix of the electronic and organic, like the duality of feeling both robotic and highly emotional at the same time.
“A lot of the process of writing this album came from pushing ourselves to our limits to get the essential idea […] Writing, re-writing, deleting, re-recording […] the best idea would come out of that final push when you’re too exhausted to even think and you rely on feeling.”
There’s also a common theme of unease that comes through in the album, in part down to Doherty’s move across the pond to live in London, and the often sense of loss of control he’d be feeling in life. There are many dark and sultry corners to the album that echo his need to “escape by dipping more into a hedonistic existence”.
Tracks like “Hold My Head” demonstrate this. In a forcefully synth-driven message about wanting, you get a real sense of grasping in the dark, always hunting for something more. The immediacy of the album’s title track is also an infectious one, with a simplistic primal beat the intensity of that kind of hysterical release of emotion is completely clear. The lyrics on the record are mostly simplistic and repetitive, but they strengthen the mechanised idea of living in this state of exhaustion. And as with tracks like “A Circle”, which opens sounding very much like 00s electronica and with Daft Punk as an obvious influence, it’s the addition of Doherty’s flamboyant vocals that insert a vulnerable human element into an otherwise digital soundscape.
There are a variety of influences coming through, with more industrial elements as on “Make U Feel”, blended with pulsating synths and rocky guitar riffs that build on a multi-faceted genre of dance music. Album closer “Yves Klein Blue” takes a different turn again, in the form of a quivering new-wave style ballad, as if Ultravox had soundtracked a dimly-lit alleyway meeting in a film noir scene. There’s much to get your head around.
It's the constant pitting against each other of adjacent styles that makes Baba Ali an interesting listen, even if perhaps that leaves the album unsure of any direction, but then that only further echoes the time and emotions of the band working under the weight of endless touring life.
