Clean Bandit

The British Electronic music band “Clean Bandit” released their second studio album “What is Love?” in November 2018 through Atlantic Records, four years after they released their first album. There have been strong influences of R&B besides regular electronic pop and dance music, with a lot of computer-generated work. Grace Chatto, the cellist and vocalist of the trio said that while the last album was light hearted, this one is more lyrically serious as well as “dancey”. Many of these tracks are pre-released hits. The songs in the album feature a lot of collaborations with various musicians like Rita Ora, Tove Styrke, Ellie Goulding, Julia Michaels, Zara Larsson, Demi Lovato, Luis Fonsi and Sean Paul. There is a total of twelve tracks in the album with a total running time of approximately forty-three minutes. However, four more tracks are added in the deluxe edition of the album. The album mostly received positive reviews from the music critics and listeners, however there were some mixed reviews as well. AllMusic rated the album 4 out of 5 stars and said that it “was worth the long wait” and also that the “midtempo jams are as addictive as the euphoric singles, providing contemplative balance and additional opportunities to showcase each inspired collaboration”. Q Magazine also praised the album saying “What Is Love? is a superior compilation, but it's held together by Clean Bandit's winning way with a catchy, wistful tune”. On the other hand, the British newspapers The Guardian and The Independent both rated the album 2 out of 5 stars. The Independent called the album “A shallow, algorithm-friendly array of synthetic pop devotion” and said it was “a more market taster than art”. The Guardian’s album review was also on the negative side as it said, “Melodies are frequently forced and characterless, and many songs possess an almost computer-generated quality: either riddled with counterintuitive or resembling other people’s work”. It received a decent overall rating of 66 out of 100 on Metacritic. The album was featured in many music charts across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. It topped the US Top Dance/Electronic Albums (Billboard) chart and reached the third position on the Australian Dance Albums (ARIA) chart.

When you prepare a coffee, you do follow the exact combination to have the same coffee every morning. You follow a formula to get a certain result every time you try. And although sometimes the same coffee every day tires and, it seems something different, it is not wrong to use exact recipes when it comes to the palate. But in art is different and, above all, when your origins and influences have nothing to do with places, styles and ways of conceiving the different currents that give identity to entire regions; it takes much more than putting everything in a cup and mix, the results can be disastrous and end with reputations and even careers. The album, What Is Love? by Clean Bandit aims to be universal and wants to reach a very broad audience by trying to speak in the musical language of other cultures, when in fact that audience was already there and understood the British band very well. I do not think there is a need to change if we do not advance or enrich some genre or style. Rather it seems that the guys who were once the sensation of breaking into an unusual proposal among electropop lovers when introducing that baroque style and the classic touches that characterized them, went the easiest way and the results are at the sight and everyone's ears. Decadent, predictable, without energy and with songs that perhaps their most loyal public, did not ask. It's coffee without caffeine, lactose-free milk, a record that they will want to forget soon and get to work with greater seriousness, sincerity and without falling into the commercial pressures that the record labels usually exert on all the artists who obtain a success as great as Clean Bandit. It is not a disk to erase and not to listen again since there are two or three songs that can be rescued and the quality of sound and recording with which it was made is typical of the artists who have budget.

Jamiroquai was my guy. I discovered him how everyone else basically discovered him in the nineties. “Virtual Insanity” and its one of a kind sliding floor music video. Changed the game. I stayed up on other British music like Daft Punk and Moloko and even went to England for a time visiting some distant relatives. The impression I got from my adventures and the people I danced and partied with is that they had this thing for ‘disco.’ In fact, they called events or places to dance discos. I as an American knew what disco really was. But I suppose I was thrilled that this island was sort of behind in the times, but also celebratory of the times, equating to a sense of dancing without judgement. Clean Bandit, not surprisingly, a British dance band, is a more modern continuation of that very English spirit – and I was so blessed to experience it first, in the early 2000s.

A lot of girls say the most cliché thing they possibly could and claim that a band like Clean Bandit, and an album like New Eyes, is just Forever 21 music, or Abercrombie & Fitch music, and that irks me to no end. First of all, this is such good music taken on it’s own, not tied to these corporations. It is these types of attitudes that has always kept my friends stupid when it comes to music preference. I especially hated when I was the driver, excited to play a band like Clean Bandit, and the very second that so and so would hear the track, she would say ‘oh this is what the play at Forever 21, next.’ I never understood that – I could never tell if they thought the music was cool or not cool. It was more of a blanket statement that was meant to make the person saying it sound intellectual.

For the period of time I was listening to music like New Eyes, I was following the trail of what I considered a goddess for at least a year. She was the most beautiful person I had ever scene, not because she was traditionally beautiful of course, but because she had these characteristics, like an interesting nose, full lips (which I kissed), and the body of a dancer. She happened to be a disco dancer, and this disco revival was in. New Eyes capitalized on that essence of time, and I would go to all the events he would invite me to, thinking that one of those nights, we would fall in love finally. But I was just one of many on the dance floor.

There are few things I hate more in this world than being proven wrong about a long-held ideal of mine, especially when it pertains to musical opinion as I pride myself on having a decent grasp of what’s considered truly compelling music & what’s utter garbage worthy of critical evisceration. Regarding this line of thought, Clean Bandit’s phenomenal debut album New Eyes is easily the sharpest thorn in my side, as it goes against every single one of my prejudices against the English trio I’ve cultivated over the years, giving people on the other side of the debate some incredibly well-designed ammo to fire back whenever I voice any gripes about their most recent commercial & creative flops – To roll things back a bit, I’ve spent the last few years absolutely shitting on Clean Bandit as a band, in part for their role in popularizing the mid-teens Tropical Pop revolution that spawned directly from Reggae Fusion & in another for their seeming inability to escape this decidedly-profitable subgenre on 2018’s What Is Love?, shamelessly selling out & following mainstream trends rather than using their immense fame to produce something truly original that could inspire the next generation of Electronic performers to break away from accepted formulas; It seemed every single time you heard the group’s name in the news, it was always attached to an incredibly generic Caribbean-inspired Dance Pop tune that sounded eerily similar to everything else on the radio, generally receiving such critical acclaim for the inclusion of up & coming celebrity artists who were popular with the young’ns, thereby perpetuating the cycle of Pop music’s current monotony by refusing to evolve in any tangible way. I’m sure much of my disdain came from jealousy, as every boring Pop artist with a formulaic style tends to grind my gears when there’re so many brilliant bands out there with incredible understandings of musical theory just waiting to be discovered, but I quickly grew to despise the trio whenever I heard their names, turning the act of trash talking into a somewhat pleasurable hobby I engaged in whenever possible – Well, while modern songs like “Solo” with Demi Lovato are undeniably corny & others like the Sean Paul & Anne-Marie collaboration “Rockabye” still make me want to slit my wrists, I’m pleased to say I’ve gained a newfound respect for Clean Bandit’s earlier days after making a return trip to New Eyes as it’s chock-full of stellar hits I’d previously had absolutely no idea they wrote, the vast majority of their driving compositions accounting for some of my favourite House jams of the last decade. Though this directly conflicted with my fervent hatred, it was actually an astounding revelation of both good & bad implications; On the one hand, it meant Clean Bandit were actually pretty magnificent musicians at one time who’ve surprised me in spectacular fashion, though on the other it means their recent quality has fallen at an exponential rate to a comparably inferior level, validating my current criticisms of their unsatisfying follow-up record wholeheartedly – So, yeah, I guess you could say New Eyes is the gift that keeps on giving.