Lost In Music

Having built a reputation as a drum'n'bass producer of some note for East London's original nuttahs Emotif, Gervais Cook — the Boy Lost in Music of the B.L.I.M. acronym — dropped his sound down a gear in order to follow labelmates T.Power and Freq Nasty into the comparatively bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new-school breaks scene, which had grown to usurp the preceding big beat by the tail end of the '90s. Having notched up well-received singles for keynote labels Hooj, TCR, Distinctive Breaks, Marine Parade, and his own Track imprint, as well as having turned out some fine mixes and suitably sweaty collaborations with such tastemakers as Rennie Pilgrem and Chris Carter, he finally gets down to the gritty business of his debut full-length outing. For an artist with such a wealth of material behind him, it is little surprise to find this collection as confident out on the dancefloor as it is tucked up close to the home stereo. While "Dust" rocks the bongos and "Crazy Things" is a veritable study of breaks and bass in its switch between a series of rib-rattling electro patterns, so the two-part "Loonies/Afrique" is less urgent, with B-movie speech linking the respective halves into gently undulating cinematica. There are fillers, with "Tattoo" slightly too one-dimensional to warrant inclusion on an album and "Too Clever" a quickly irritating study of echo, but in the main, B.L.I.M. demonstrates a clear and present understanding of how a dance music album should operate.