Barnes & Noble
Check it: Drum 'n' bass as a generic term is irrelevant; there are too many other musical influences to stick only to breakbeats and bass lines. Illustrating that point is TWO PAGES, the third album by 4 Hero (Dego and Mark Mac). The first half of the album represents a radical departure from hardcore drum 'n' bass, with full orchestral arrangements sharing space with insistent breakbeats, rhymes, jazzy harmonies, and funky soul. Poet Ursula Rucker struts her stuff on the album's opening tune, "Loveless," while "Garden of My Life," "Greys," and "Escape That" are imbued with extended intros, choral accompaniment, and lush arrangements. The second half of the collection returns to 4 Hero's club roots, creating excitement with dense, old-school drum 'n' bass ("Pegasus 51," "De Sci Fer," "We Who Are Not as Others") and authentic hip-hop ("The Action," featuring Digable Planets rapper Butterfly). In trying to explain how music got to where it is today, 4 Hero has, with 1998's TWO PAGES, created an invaluable manifesto, and we should all take notes. Chiedo Nkwocha
All Music Guide
It's nearly impossible to listen to 4 Hero's Two Pages without thinking about the incredible success enjoyed by the jungle movement (and Roni Size's New Forms LP in particular) during the four-year gap which separated Dego and Mark Mac's second album from their third. With LTJ Bukem, the duo were one of the first jungle acts to desert hardcore for the astral drift of jazz-fusion atmospheres, and Two Pages is about as fusion-soaked as it gets. The first of the two discs includes the more downtempo R&B, almost orchestral side of 4 Hero, quite indebted to jazz luminaries like Pharoah Sanders, Lonnie Liston Smith and Roy Ayers. Many of the instruments are live contributions, while vocalists as wide-ranging as poet Ursula Rucker and Digable Planets rapper Butterfly make appearances. The second disc is the dancefloor (read: tighter) half of the album, skirting through dense soundscapes of paranoid breakbeats. As could be expected, more than two hours of music is way too much for listeners to work their way through, and a heavy editing job would have made this a stellar album instead of the flawed and somewhat bloated album it turned out to be. For drum'n'bass fans, the real highlights come with second-disc tracks like "We Who Are Not as Others" and "In the Shadows" -- as it is, they're so terrific as to nearly justify purchase by themselves. (The American version of Two Pages edited the album down to fit on a single disc, and also added several tracks not available on the British two-CD version.) John Bush