HOT NATURED

DIFFERENT SIDES OF THE SUN (Hot Creations / Warner)

5/20

When Hot Natured’s Benediction breached the UK’s Top 40, band member Jamie Jones felt compelled to defend himself. They had been accused of “selling out”; of making some Faustian pact with The Major Labels. Some even claimed Jones planned to collaborate with Akon.

Hot Natured have not “sold out” — at least, not in that sense. For that to be true, they’d have to be making music they didn’t like purely for money. This is not the case. They are making music (they say, earnestly) they love; music that, it just so happens, is popular. Consequently, some of Hot Natured’s critics seem less motivated by protecting the integrity of True Underground House — whether or not it’s their place to do so; whatever that is — and more by an anger that ‘their’ music has become more mainstream, less esoteric and, therefore, less cool.

This is not the problem we have with Hot Natured. Dance music that is also pop music is fine with us. What is not fine, however, is releasing tracks of such complete, ket-laced insipidness it’s difficult to know when they stop being boring and start being offensive; of such scant variation between them they’ll only abet the lie that “all dance music sounds the same”; and of such a palpable lack of effort you may well give up on them just as they’ve given up on creating something interesting.

Album opener Operate starts promisingly with some Detroit-esque pads and a choppy, filtered guitar. Then the vocals start. The lyrics are those of a high-schooler aiming for snappy poeticism, but instead barfing-up clumsy banality: “Static information confuses communication / System failure, I’m losing control”. What is “static information”, exactly? No one expects Shakespearean lyrics in dance music — or pop, incidentally — but we do expect them to make some sense, and at least fit the metre.

Then, Isis (Magic Carpet Ride). Apparently, the fact that Isis is an Ancient Egyptian goddess can be represented sonically by ‘snake-charmer flutes’, and lyrically by the imagined sensuality of an enigmatic woman. The first and last minutes have just about every stereotypical ‘Egyptian’ sound there is, and the middle few see Ali Love and Egyptian Lover (see what they did there?) try to seduce Isis via their “Magic Carpet Ride” — a lame reference to drug-taking. You’d have thought Egyptians have enough to worry about at the moment without their history and culture being patronisingly appropriated in this way.

There are then 13 other songs. Reverse Skydiving sees singer Anabel Englund mistake laziness for insouciance; Different Sides has a decent clap, a more intricate beat, but the same bass sound they use in everything and some truly nonsensical lyrics; Planet Us aims for chilled, misses, hits tiresome instead; Tightrope is the silly, bouncy pastiche of 80s boogie no one asked for; and so on for most of the rest, apart from Forward Motion and Benediction. These are both decent dance tracks that deserved the airplay and plaudits they’ve received. But they’re already old in dance-music-terms, and they can’t salvage this.

Hot Natured have not sacrificed True Underground House upon the altar of Commercial Success. The Hot Creations camp have always released music that skirted around the poppier edges of house and techno. But Different Sides… is just a bad album. Hot Natured sound spent. Why buy this when there are hundreds of artists making music like this? What are they delivering that’s unique anymore? Absolutely nothing, because they themselves did it years ago. This is what dance music sounds like when the industry’s ‘fresh new sound’ is used first as an incubator, then a mausoleum.

– – – – – – – – – –

Words: Robert Bates