Autoimmune

Album Review

For Meat Beat Manifesto's tenth album, Autoimmune, Jack Dangers takes listeners on an exhilarating aural exploration of the past, present, and future, rampaging across genres along the way. "International" and its counterpart "International Reprise" set the stage and bookend the album with their round-the-world radio IDs and cut-and-paste samples injecting rock guitar and glossy organ stabs with a hint of dub rubbing up against the brusk backbeat. It's the perfect synopsis of much of Meat Beat's musical manifesto. Two decades ago, when the group were beginning their journey, techno, too, was starting its inexorable rise, and "Spanish Vocoder" brightly recalls those heady days of creative frisson, irrepressible beats, and bubbly atmospheres that took the clubs by storm. "Vocoder" is an homage, and "Less" is more of a clinical dissection, as if Dangers is slowly disemboweling Prodigy to read the augers from their innards. If that's disconcerting, "Hellfire" is deliberating discomforting, all squelchy rhythm and off-kilter keyboards, whose vocal sample, "this is only a test," is anything but reassuring. It's just one of a clutch of experimental pieces ranging from the spooky noises splattered across "Colors of Sound" to the foreboding militancy of "Return to Bass," and across the dystopian, robotic soundscapes of "62 Dub." "Dub" is far from anything envisioned by its late progenitor King Tubby; more recognizable is "Guns N Lovers," a bristling dub-dustrial hybrid, and "Lonely Soldier" with its ominous air, martial beats, and a militant sampled dancehall toast, the latter coming courtesy of a Dennis Bovell album. On "Soldier" past and present combine; on "I Hold the Mic!" the future beckons. Daddy Sandy delivers the swaggering, boastful toast on "Mic" but is bested by Azeem, whose rap and tongue floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee across "Young Cassius." Bouncing back into the past, "Solid Waste" pays tribute to old-school hip-hop, and instantly brings to mind Dangers' previous work with Public Enemy. For all its leaps across the years and genres, Autoimmune is a thoroughly cohesive set, as MBM stop and take stock, then plunge boldly into the future.