LAMB meld the kinetics of drum'n'bass to the sensuality of soul. The result is little short of wonderful...

DIFFERENCE. Disparity. Diametric opposition, even. Conflicting ideas and interests are the grist of any good relationship - provided, of course, that you get the rub just right. A fraction too much friction and you're f***ed, exhausted by the efforts required to defend a psyche under siege in a push-me-pull-me power tussle. When the wrongness: rightness ratio is just so, though, the door of creativity is free to fly wide open and let in something weird and wonderful.

Like Lamb. Louise Rhodes reckons a lot of techno is literally painful to listen to; she loves soul. Andy Barlow believes that most of that is cheesy beyond belief; it's hip hop and techno that make his heart tick. Luckily, they agree on one thing - the thrillingly dramatic potential of drum'n'bass, the way that its tone-on-tone rhythmic drive can be used as a foil for pretty much whatever you please, the fact that it's the sound of the immediate future. For now, at least. And for Lamb, that's long enough to make things to love that truly last.

"Lamb" offsets the characteristic dryness, the tachometric snap'n'crack of drum'n'bass with a mesh of different textures - cello, guitar, vibes, double bass, trumpet, Louise's gorgeous, haunted voice - to turn it into something sumptuously organic, making a solipsistic dreambed of delicate despondency that you could loll around in for all eternity. It's where LTJ Bukem trips the light fantastic with Sinead O'Connor, and it's a lovely place to be.

Rhodes and Barlow pitch into the centre of the album's quiet emotional storm right from the off with "Lusty", which, like pretty much everything else here, deals with love, loss and longing. Then there's "God Bless", which starts with a hiss of rattlesnake urgency before it eases into keening despair with a rubbery, subaquatic double bass; the first of two mixes of "Cotton Wool", whose angularity and savagery perfectly recreate the psychosis of sleepless, worry-filled nights and which is about as far removed from the divine Fila Brazillia remix as Pluto is from Plumstead. A minimal, wintry "Zero", an almost unbearably bereft "Feela" and the dark, obsessive "Gold" complete the set of moody communications from the dark side of Lamb's soul.

There's a load of weird shit, too, of course. "Transfatty Acid" bumps along to a hip hop beat and, where you'd expect a rap, there's what sounds like someone blowing down a vacuum-cleaner Pipe before Louise comes smooching in disguised as Eartha Kitt, a zither does very un-zither-like things and, somewhere in the background, the Tardis hits Mach 10. And "Gorecki" is a sonic sunset of tables, keys and strings that eddies and whirls in an exotic, slow-building, blood-rush flow - a kind of modernist mix of Trans Global Underground's "I Voyager" and My Bloody Valentine's "To Here Knows When".

Soul has become possibly the most tragically debased musical currency of our time; drum'n'bass is poised on the brink of being dangerously overvalued. In one fell swoop, "Lamb" has restored the balance of power to both. What a lovely weigh to go.

rated:  "bloody essential"

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review:  Sharon O'Connell

nicked from 'Melody Maker', dated 7 September 1996

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