Bomb The Bass
Clear

'Clear' by Bomb The Bass was released in '95 after the project's leader, Tim Sheffield, had shaken the English airwaves for half a decade with the best of violent and revolutionary house music.
'Clear' is the album where Bomb The Bass opens up to more accessible music and to a less uncompromising approach.

The opening track Bug Power Dust sounds like a remix of the most vibrant Red Hot Chili Peppers by the Prodigy. Sleepyhead and One To Religion ride a bouncy and exotic wave in the sea of trip-hop. A gem of the album and perhaps the most beautiful is Black Heart: like the most Central European Depeche Mode in session with the monstrous Jamaican rhythm section of Sly & Robbie that first paints everything in dub and then transforms it into a raggamuffin fugue... God, how this piece excites and carries me away!

Another gem is Braindead, a wonderful exotic trip with a mood that I almost understand; it's both sexy and trippy at the same time, like a red fog of smoke that envelops you... Other tracks on the album are less beautiful, in fact, they sound like filler, quite banal and too close to the cheap chill-out from boutiques constructed in series along with thousands of other rhythm-electronica-seductive-smoothed-sounds-and-speaking-cadenced-voice stereotypes. To get passionate again, you must reach the end of the album with the adorable funky rhythm of Sandcastles and the ethnic suggestions of Empire (the wonderful Sinead O'Connor on vocals, proving once again how she was born to sing over suggestive electronic bases) that anticipates the Wax Poetic by ten years.

All in all, a nice album, not a cornerstone of the genre, unfortunately, it shows some uncertainty and, ten years after its release, it sounds a bit outdated, not very visionary and innovative compared to a contemporary masterpiece like 'Leftism'.