Zero 7 ‘Another Late Night’
March 27th, 2002 by freddie96
ZERO 7
Another Late Night
(Treacle)
Anything with Zero 7′s name on it is guaranteed to make Big Chillers prick up their ears, and this will surely be no exception. The fourth in Another Late Night’s current series of downtempo compilations (the initial prototype from Groove Armada seems to have been temporarily deleted), it not only does what it says on the tin – delivers good, smoky late night listening – but also provides a welcome glimpse into the musical forms that inspire the Zero 7 boys.
Those who enjoyed Sam Hardaker’s set at last year’s Enchanted Garden won’t be surprised to learn that this mix features a large dose of hip hop. It kicks off with four such tracks, from Yesterday’s New Quintet, Quasimoto, Roots Manuva (a dub version of ‘Witness’) and Slum Village, before sliding into more alternative territory: the moody and intense ‘Channel 1 Suite’ from Cinematic Orchestra, one of Joy Zipper’s less whimsical tracks and a lovely, delicate track from the inimitable Jim O’Rourke. Hats off to the Zeroes for including these last two; as the recent ‘Acoustic Chill’ showed, the US is still producing as much great leftfield music as ever, even if it seems to get a good deal less exposure than America’s more traditional product or the UK’s homegrown talent.
The compilation’s second half is, if anything, even more varied. The tempo picks up again with a little more hip hop (Souls of Mischief’s ode to urban chilling ’93 Til Infinity’) , and the percussive Latin sound of Da Lata (the somewhat over-played ‘Pra Manha’). Things then briefly get a little loungey, with Herbert’s remix of Serge Gainsbourg’s batty ‘Bonnie & Clyde’, and a not especially interesting Ashley Beedle mix of a Shawn Lee track called ‘Happiness’, before we finally hit some 70s and 80s soul. At last!
Hence this mix ends in fine style: Sylvia Striplin’s squelchy ‘You Can’t Turn Me Away’, Don Blackman’s ‘Loving You, Holding You’ and a sublime track from Leroy Hutson called ‘Cool Out’. Appropriately enough, this is the first point in this mix when you can hear anything that really begins to approach the Zero 7 sound – that apparently meandering mix of mellow beats, strings and instrumentation that builds to suprisingly intense peaks – for it leads straight into the album’s stand-out track, Zero 7′s instrumental version of Jonny Osbourne’s ‘Truth and Rights’.
If you’ve been to Chilli Dog recently and heard Pete Lawrence playing this, or experienced Zero 7 themselves playing it out live last year (it made a show-stopping encore), you will know that this is one of the tunes that is going to make 2002 as memorable a year for chillers as 2001 was. No question about it, it’s an absolutely inspired version. With that mysterious Zero 7 studio magic, it takes Osbourne’s simple but haunting melody and transforms it into an extraordinarily powerful piece of music that steadily tightens its grip upon your heart until it reaches an intensity that is probably best described as religious. You can only imagine what they will make of it if they do a version with Mozez’s gospel-inspired vocals… we will all be crying in the aisles and falling to our knees.
There is one final tune to help you regain your breath – The Stylistics’ lovely ‘People Make The World Go Round’ – but my bet is you will turn straight back to ‘Truth & Rights’. That track alone turns what might otherwise be simply ‘another late night’ into something else altogether. Although it’s slightly self-defeating – the thrill of hearing something so new and so good temporarily eclipses everything else in the mix – it reinforces what a rare and special talent Zero 7 possess. God bless them. FB
