Gavin Froome - Underground Heroes

Following 2001's great Post + Beam album I was expecting big things from this release. Unfortunately I was quite disappointed. Gavin once again provides a mixture of downtempo and house tracks. The problem is that many of the house tracks are actually very repetitive and therefore quite boring. Get Up for example has a great funky feel to it with some nice horn stabs but hardly changes at all for the close to six minutes it lasts. Alpine Pools is also funky but again hardly changes throughout and at eight minutes long really feels drawn out. The downtempo tracks aren’t much better. All Night adds some vocal and guitar samples but just didn’t do it for me. After The Rain is a fairly average slow track with atmospherics, strings and a sax sample which ends up sounding quite uninspired. In fact a lot of the downtempo tracks feel like they were thrown in just to fill space in the album.

If you haven’t heard any Gavin Froome material I would highly recommend checking out both Post + Beam and Mobile Villager (his first album from 1999) as they are both fine examples of how good house albums can be. I would suggest avoiding Underground Heroes though as it conversely shows just how boring some instrumental house albums can be.