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(Distinctive Breaks/DMC)
It’s funny what a difference bad luck can make to a record. In Hybrid’s case, for their first new album since the widely acclaimed and still much loved brilliance of 1999’s ‘Wide Angle’, the difference is all encompassing. While beginning the recording of this album in 2002, Mike Truman and Chris Healing’s (who make up the creative team behind Hybrid) studio was broken into. Although much of what had already been layed down in the studio escaped harm (tracks like ‘Gravastar’, and the beginnings of ‘Higher than a Skyscraper’ for example, arguably amongst the best tracks on the new album), the incident caused the producing duo to question their work so far and ultimately, to head off in an entirely new direction with the rest of the album. When they eventually returned to the studio, vocalist Adam Taylor and New Order bassist Peter Hook had come on board (amongst others) and the radical shift in focus was complete. The resulting work unfortunately sounds as disjointed and non-cohesive as you might expect from this broken recording process and absolutely begs, in my opinion, to be two separate albums of songs.
The record starts off promisingly enough. ‘True To Form’ resonates with Peter Hook’s absolutely unmistakable bass tones, resonating notes that have underpinned so many now classic (in the truest sense of the word) New Order songs. Over the top, the trademark lush, Hybrid orchestrated strings have been added to the mix and they still sound as great as they ever did (this time recorded in St.Petersburg with a real orchestra). But then, layered over this is the very strained vocal of new singer Taylor and frankly, it immediately spoils a perfectly good song. His disjointed take on the lyrics is off-key and entirely wrong for this track. Later, I’m Still Awake becomes yet another good idea spoiled in the execution. Adam Taylor again warbles out some really banal lyrics over a rather nice backing track, but it all seems too forced, as though the vocal had been recorded in another country altogether and sent back to be carelessly matched up later. Basically the song never even gets close to working as a whole. ‘Steal You Away’ is much better, a delicate guitar-driven, synth-soaked song with a much better rendition by Taylor. I still can’t really come at his voice, but at least this song is complete, effective and doesn’t jar as much. ‘Out of the Dark’ is the final Adam Taylor vocal outing and another I really want to like. Virtually everything about the track is great, except for that damn voice of his again. He absolutely tortures the ‘torn to this’ line throughout and the entire experience is pretty unpleasant. Still, could this just be personal taste?
On the “it’s all good” side, ‘Know your Enemy’ bristles and crackles with a breakbeat energy and intensity rarely found within the rest of the album. ‘Marrakech’ too is an interesting diversion, filled as it is with the sounds we all identify easily enough as Middle Eastern and in that regard, it conjures up immediate images of sand dunes and smoking hookah pipes in the first crack of dawn, watched over perhaps by friendly smiling Bedouins? Very much the ‘morning sci fi’ the title no doubt refers to…‘Blackout’ is a terrific slower number, full of the syrupy, flowing violins and gorgeous female vocals we are more used to from the Hybrid of old. It’s a track absolutely screaming out for a remix though and this is perhaps the most notable lowlight of the album, in that the production fails to make the songs here stand alone as a cohesive record. As with so much of ‘Morning Sci Fi’, it appears only the remixes will save the end result, the original album featuring perhaps the worst representations of the tracks on it. The pity is, these songs clearly have lots going for them and yet Hybrid has somehow failed to place them in their best light. This is not something one could ever say about any one track on their debut LP and comes as quite a shock.
‘Wide Angle’ comparisons here are hard, if not impossible to ignore, this being the difficult second album Hybrid had to produce under clearly, even more difficult circumstances. While the former album took breakbeat into the commercial stratosphere, on the back of such lushly orchestrated and beautifully realised tracks as ‘If I Survive’, ‘I Know’ and ‘Dreaming Your Dreams’, to name just a few (for the whole album was a tour-de-force), ‘Morning Sci Fi’ positively groans under the weight of balancing some great old ideas with the stiffer, much worse ideas of the new. Though the dynamic duo of Truman and Healing are still sonic producers to be reckoned with and their live shows no doubt remain everything they always have been, fans can only be disappointed with an album that, had it stuck to its original guns, could have become ‘Wide Angle 2’. Though producing another album identical to their 1st would have perhaps said too little about the creative geniuses behind this name, Hybrid have created an album that has instead left behind the best of their recent history and travelled down an altogether different road. It’s a road less travelled, to be sure, but one that is leading their audience to an unsatisfying destination with little real reward for the journey.
Not the album many of us were expecting, nor unfortunately, of the quality that they have already proven they are capable of delivering.
