Baby Mammoth - One...Two...Freak (Pork)

If Baby Mammoth are one thing for sure - then they're prolific. Having signed to Pork in 1996, this is their third album - and second to be released this year! The duo of Mark Blissenden and Andrew Burdall have already cooked up phat beats, spun drum & bass off into new directions and got everyone thinking about what they're listening to. So what next?

Anything is possible. Each track here is a superbly polished example of it how dance music really can straddle both sitting down and standing up-type activities, if it's done right. Take track 3, 'Additive', for example. This has massive club potential. And at the same time would get your lounge jumpin' on a Monday night. Elsewhere there's 'Luna Park', an aptly titled sound-scape that pits soothing chorused guitar chords and harp-like synth pads against a scat industrial backbeat. This mixes into 'For Dear Life', which takes a club friendly almost-garage beat, soothing atmospheric washes and overlays a woman recounting an O.O.B.E, or out-of-body experience. A cathartic track if every there was one.

Other tracks continue the journey of drum & bass beats into vast oceans of relatively uncharted territory. How can drum beats be fast and furious, but soft and warm at the same time? Answer - Baby Mammoth pieces like 'Zen Butchers' and 'Sound in your Mouth'.

Baby Mammoth is the most apt name for this band; at the moment friendly, cute and compact, but inevitably destined to become ominously, overpoweringly huge. 7/10


This review also published in: DJ magazine