Album Of The Week: Disclosure Settle

Has there ever been a great single-artist UK garage album? Garage, the skittery dance subgenre that crossed over in Britain around the turn of the millennium, was mostly a singles-driven genre. Built on shiny R&B hooks and tricky, propulsive drum programming, it cranked out anthem after anthem between 1999 and 2001, before it gradually morphed into grime and dubstep, and even its highest-profile practitioners were anonymous studio-rat types who could probably show up to their own video shoots and go unrecognized. They rarely stuck around long enough to record albums, and when they did, those albums usually translated to singles-plus-filler. M.J. Cole's Sincere had some serious jams and got nominated for a Mercury Music Prize, but its deep cuts sounded, at least to my ears, like attempts at smooth jazz. Basement Jaxx's 1999 debut Remedy is a very good album, but the group's anarchic sensibilities, though initially rooted in UK garage, were already exploding with way too many sounds and ideas to fit into the genre, and not all those ideas were fully realized. Artful Dodger's It's All About The Stragglers was pretty much a singles compilation, one that showed up a year late. So it's entirely possible that the first great UK garage album is one made more than a decade after the genre's moment ended, by two pasty brothers from Surrey who were babies when UK garage was having its peak moment. That's amazing.