The CD sleeve alone is enough to draw any inquisitive listener into the album, featuring pictures of 37 of the 723 objects sampled in making the album.

Other samples (which should not really come as much of a surprise — this is the man who created his 2004 album Plat du Jour using only samples of food and its packaging) include coffins, meteorites, an RAF Tornado bomber, and in a particularly delightful manner, rather fitting an artist of Herbert’s anti-capitalist tendencies, one of someone being sick outside a banquet for a London arms fair.

‘Moving Like a Train’ has a funk groove to rival Prince and the majority of tracks have a disco groove-led element, possibly borne of his recent involvement with Roisin Murphy’s Ruby Blue. The vocals from Dave Okumu, Neil Thomas, and Dani Siciliano as well as Herbert on the final track ‘Wrong’ are in perfect balance with the crisp, clinical and most importantly, musical samples which build up some of these gems.

Scale is much poppier than most of Matthew Herbert’s releases but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s less of a work of protest than any other of his works, and the pop wrapping in which he covers the songs makes the messages he encodes within them even more effective. It is suffused with intelligent sideswipes at ‘the holy mess’ that generates ‘love at war’, celebrity, the doomed oil era and the false trappings of the digital age. There are some corking one-liners too, such as one that seems to sum up Herbert’s approach to the direction society is headed: ‘if you hate the destination, enjoy the journey ‘cos you can’t get off’.

And like he says in ‘Birds of a Feather’: ‘I’m on fire baby’. And with Scale he really is.

Scale is released on 27 May on !K7 and Matthew Herbert plays ICA, London on 29 May kicking off his European tour of the album which continues throughout June in Germany, France, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Spain.

For more Matthew Herbert information:
http://www.matthewherbert.com/
http://www.matthewherbert.net/
http://www.platdujour.co.uk/
http://www.magicandaccident.com/