To All Things What They Need

A GUY CALLED GERALD
TO ALL THINGS WHAT THEY NEED
K7 CD

To chart the rise and fall of UK dance music over the past decade and a half, up until UK Garage and the birth of Grime, you could just trace the outline of A Guy Called Gerald's career — from his Acid House origins in 808 State through the ethno-funk of "Voodoo Ray", to Hardcore and Jungle and downtempo. Ironically, even as a number of Gerald reissues are slated for reissue in 2005, offering a critical reappraisal of this history, the artist himself has moved to Berlin, along with he rest of the electronic music world. To All Things What They Need, Gerald's first album in five years, draws deeply on a wide swathe of Techno memory. The record's a mixed bag — on tracks like -Millenium Sanhedrin" (featuring Ursula Rucker) and "Strangest Changes" (featuring Finley Quaye), Gerald seems so caught up in full-spectrum sound design that he forgets to push the music forward, even when employing drum 'n' bass cadences. The skittering "Meaning" sounds like the work of a breakbeat artist who just discovered Autechre's Amber, but deep Techno cuts like "To Love" revive the bleepy atmospherics of classic R&S/Apollo recordings, and the trampoline-taut, string-stabbed "Pump" is an energetic House track mat throws aside ideas of 'progression' to pay : tribute to a fully formed genre.