Mettle Music

Manchester-based pair Nic Conef and Mark Wadsworth produced a deep house album with slight disco, funk, dub and broken beat influences, true. But it just sounds so cheesy and mundane. The appropriately titled "Back Again” could be yanked straight out of the mid-’80s, which I know is trendy, but the thing is this particular style didn’t sound good the first time around, so why revisit? The poorly sung slow song "Capture Part 1” doesn’t really fit with its swelling strings and acoustic plucking. While it is impressive that they catapult from that into the dub-based "Capture Part 2,” this track looses points for sounding weak. Although there is a variety of genres from song to song, there’s nothing new here, nothing old done well enough to carry the record through all those cheers. Baffling.