A heartfelt work of staggering genius...
My musical listening history is dotted with artists who went from being the next great inspiration to just having one early album as the defining moment in their career. The mark of the true artist is not one of a discrete act of creation, but of development and ascendency. The Kleptones had that one great album, A Night at the Hip-Hopera, an exercise at once both thematically complete and diversely eclectic. This was an album so popular it was stolen from the hi-fi while it was playing at our house parties. What marks them out is that they have built on this success with each subsequent release.
Their latest work, Uptime / Downtime, scoops up a great armful of my most favourite tunes for a hug that delights as much as it surprises with a continuation of the double album concept of 24 Hours. As my friend Joe would say, so retro, so future... to a point where the vital feeling I had when I first listened to these old friends is recaptured in these multi-layered self-referential slices of pop (culture). The Kleptones are successful at recycling the inherently disposable into something greater than the sum of their parts; making the tunes that really meant something into genre and time-spanning dancefloor fillers, whether that floor is a club or your own front room.
