As with seal-the-deal single I Need Air however, it's a touch arresting to encounter a record as indebted to the pure pop side to 90s house as it is to the D-word, orchestral opener Flying Into Tokyo lingering in ambient realms even. Fire, featuring Ms. Dynamite's best dancehall impression follows, in an explosive few minutes that ignite the dubstep tinge to the eponymous long player, before it's back to blip basics with the suffocating I Need Air, a track that's become as essential to contemporary pop music as controversy is to Cheryl Cole, four minutes at the end of which you'll be on a drip if of a jittery disposition. Things get filthy with The Bug, as a menacing, androgynous monologue duets with a robotic baritone probably usually employed to invoke terror in the Ford factory, whilst the ringtone thrill of Mad lowers the BPM with rattling arpeggios. It's not all steely rhythmic majesty however, as K Dance chugs like a microwave on the eve of eruption, and Crossover comes across saccharine enough to have you puking all the iron that resides in your bowels. The happiest of house influences emerges in the form of Anthemic, a slab of cataclysmic destructo dance hefty enough to sink Ibiza, whilst the twinkling keys of Ping Pong bounce about off the inner shell of your skull for seconds on minutes on hours. The autotune of Boiling Water scalds like an infernal sauna fuming with pins and needles, Box Of Ghosts is hauntingly minimal, subliminally simplistic, and Karma Crazy is The Bloody Beetroots' Warp 1.9 were it conceived beneath a graffitied underpass on the outskirts of Easton, Bristol. Yet as purveyed by I Need Air, it's when Magnetic Man hit unchartered chartable territory that they're at their most devastating, to which forthcoming Katy B-featuring single Perfect Stranger attests, as clean-cut grassroots drum'n'bass permeates the smoothest of vocals atop mountains of euphoric frequencies, and Getting Nowhere, the bizarre return of the transatlantic Lionel Richie, John Legend, that weds Play-era Moby and you-know-what in the holiest of matrimonies. A revelatory revolution of a record, and one that may well protrude its presumed territories. If needs be...
