Matthew Herbert Big Band There’s Me and There’s You Music Review

Posted on 21. Dec, 2008 by Administrator in Music

Ah, the poor Herberts of the world. Work as hard as they might, their silly name holds them in strange check. While Matthew Herbert is a genius in his intensive search for and use of found sound, he can’t seem to make a good song on this outing. For this album, he sampled the incubator that kept his son alive for two months, women spraying perfume in the halls of the British Museum, and the voices of a hundred volunteers saying “Yes”. Herbert’s been known for his techno work and avant garde jazz wanderings, but here, and in this case in particular, he has done the most amazing work of gathering odd and meaningful audio ingredients, only to have them be ruined by a terrible female vocalist who is of the egocentric-bad-voice-ruiner-of-good-jazz variety. I won’t mention her name so as not to shame her family. Her vocals and words are pathetically mediocre and almost make you enjoy contemporary jazz, for she tries too hard and too much, only making you wish she’d shut up and let the band, or samples if you will, play. At the same time, she gets no help from the structure of the songs which are never enticing or memorable or enjoyable. Perhaps it should’ve just been an album of samples, it’s sad that so much cathartic and interesting work was done to be ruined in such a manner. I guess writing songs and finding a good singer might be pretty important after all.

Good For: Your own ego, a beer coaster, throwing at people. Bad For: Your ears.

by Devoe Yates

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