With their first album, the music band from London occupied the top of the charts and then many awards enriched the beginning of their career, including Brit Award for the best album. They were also nominated for Mercury Prize and MTV Video Music Awards.
Rudimental are Pers Agget, Kesi Dryden, Amir Amor and DJ Locksmith. They are known for collaborations and both of their albums are overcrowded with duets. As they say, their mission is to bring back the soul to the electronic music. They are not just electronic producers or guitar and piano players that don’t know how to produce a beat. High level of attention is build by mix of jazz, blues, hip hop and electronic music that converged into a drum’n bass band with the flair of soul and r’n’b.
Let me say it immediately, their second album We The Generation is bad. It seems like they are followed by the curse of the second album because it is so confusing and uninspiring mixture of pop, soul, electronic and hip hop that doesn’t have neither the head nor a tail. It is difficult to determine why but the album is hyper produced with aggressive arrangements that make your ears bleed. Lyrically, love is in the first plan but clichés and sleazy choruses made me puke inside. Love Ain’t Just A Word that features Anne Marie who does vocally everything that is supposed to be done but the song as a whole is a pop lemonade without passion. I Will For Love and All That Love are equally tired and pretentious with naïve lyrics and intrusive sound that doesn’t make sense when we try to remember Rudimental from the debut album.
Such a huge amount of pop was unnecessary. If there was more soul, this conglomerate of bad articulations and awful tones would make more sense. Too Cool and Lay It All On Me both feature Ed Sheeran and they are maybe the only solid tracks because everything else is simply not possible to listen.
This album is a big disappointment because Rudimental stepped away from their fundamental. Satisfying the market is never a good aspiration for art.
