I wish I could change my vote from "Not That Great" to "Pretty Good" because upon a 2nd and 3rd listening a lot of the songs held together well. My dilemma is that 15-20 new releases come across my desk on a weekly basis and there's not enough time to give each release a fair hearing. My bias against UNKLE stems from the fact that every album they've released in the past decade has disappointed me. With each new release since 2000, UNKLE's lack of a creative vision became more apparent.
In the bigger picture of things, UNKLE's first generation trip-hop peers like Massive Attack, Portishead and Zero 7 have long since disavowed the trip-hop tag and developed a more organic approach that spans multiple music genres and they've defied those critics and marketing specialists who've attempted to place their music in the trip-hop category, by default. UNKLE has seemed content to rest on it's trip-hop laurels and release a passable product every two years, however mediocre that final product ended up being.
Where Did the Night Fall is marks a big improvement for UNKLE's career path because co-founder Richard File has exited his partnership with the other co-founder James Lavelle. File's replacement by Pablo Clements as Lavelle's sideman has finally broken the decade long impasse in UNKLE's musical development.
The newly constituted Clements/Lavelle duo has andandonned UNKLE's overworked trip hop template and UNKLE's reliance on digitally skewed breakbeats has fallen to the wayside. Pablo Clemments brings a denser, darker, heavily orchestrated Brit-rock sound that won't please everybody but the revamped UNKLE sound is a marked improvement over UNKLE's predictable old school downtempo sound of the past decade. In the brave new world of post-millenium electronic music, UNKLE was beginning to sound quaint and Lavelle was losing ground to a younger and hungrier generation of deejays.
There are a half dozen tracks on the album that are worthy efforts especially the two tracks that feature Elle J. as vocalist (The Runaway & On A Wire). I also liked both of Gavin Clark's two featured vocal tracks (The Healing & Falling Star). Follow Me Down the track posted by Bulldog at the top of the thread is also a very stong track. I'm on my fourth listening to Joy Factory right now as I writing this and I'm thinking it may be the best track on the album.
All of UNKLE's studio releases (including the much ballyhooed Psyence Ficton) are uneven and there's no such thing as a perfect UNKLE album. UNKLE's gears have been stuck in neutral since 1998 and they've gained a good deal of musical traction with Where Did the Night Fall, which is as good or better than Psyence Fiction.
The flip-side of the equation is that that my praise is by no means unconditional. The problem with both Where Did the Night Fall and Psyence Ficton has to do with the quality of the musical selections. More than 50% the material on both Where Did the Night Fall and Psyence Fiction misses the mark and UNKLE has a longstanding history of padding their studio album releases with content filling throwaway songs.
I'd rather see Lavelle & Clements release a first rate 30 minute EP with 5 or 6 cherry picked selections that are worthy of repeated listenings, rather than a full length 60 minute LP where half of the 14 songs are mediocre content filler. Maybe UNKLE should take 5-10 years to release a picture perfect studio album with 15 flawless selctions, in the same unhurried manner as Portishead & Massive Attack. Music executives hate bands that take forever to produce a product but a lazy work ethic in the recording studio can produce some amazing results.
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