Sneaker Pimps, Becoming X

You're just going to have to trust me on this, but this album is a great soundtrack to Love In The Time Of Cholera. Or at least, it was for me when I bought it the same summer I was reading the novel. It worked for me, when they sailed off into the sunset at the end of the book accompanied by the dulcet tones of "How Do". But my first exposure to the Sneaker Pimps occurred in early 1997 when I heard Armand Van Helden's pornographically phenomenal remix of "Spin Spin Sugar" in a club. The album is a much darker, downtempo affair than this dance track, or Nellee Hooper's bouncy single mix of "6 Underground", so I get frustrated when critics dismiss the Sneaker Pimps as trip-hop also-rans. Okay, so sampling John Barry, as the band does with his Golden Girl theme in "6 Underground", was already pretty tired by this point, but at least they weren't throwing yet another remix of the James Bond theme onto the dance floor. The Sneaker Pimps were, for the most part, critically overlooked when they emerged into an already-crowded genre in 97-98. A lot of reviews said "too much like Portishead" or "two much like Morcheeba", which was many critics' borderline-sexist response to any electronic act with a female vocalist. But a closer listen reveals that the Pimps were more influenced by the moodiness of the New Romantics and the art-rock angularity of Can, and they say as much in interviews in case you don't catch the David Sylvian sample in "Waterbaby".

The album begins with "Low Place Like Home", dropping us into a dark hole from which the next ten songs may, or may not, deliver us. "Roll On" is perhaps the closest the album comes to the vogue sexuality of trip-hop, and then perhaps only because it's a barely-veiled ode to cunnilingus. "Walking Zero" matches mopey string pads to a shuffling kick drum. "Spin Spin Sugar", unlike its drum & bass remix, has a punishing, off-kilter drum loop and breaks down halfway through the song into a sample of a woman sobbing and lamenting something in Italian.

I don't mean to say that the Sneaker Pimps shouldn't be classified as trip-hop, since most of the trademarks are there: slinky rhythms, breathy female vocals, sampled beats and scratches. But there's something more there, something sinister and saturnine than simple dancefloor hedonism. "Postmodern Sleaze" is a condemnation of a teenage drama queen set to acoustic drums and guitar and upright bass. "How Do" is a lovely cover of a song featured in the early-70s cult horror film The Wicker Man. It's a beautiful song, to be sure, but hardly innocent-in the film, it's sung by a young, completely nude Britt Eckland while she pounds on the walls of her bedroom, as if possessed. Here, that vaguely erotic insanity is suggested as, toward the end of the song, the pastoral acoustic guitar is overtaken by harsher drum loops and distorted synth washes. Much like the aforementioned book with which the album formed an unlikely pair for me, these songs plumb the usual mysteries of love and sex, but through a obsessive, dirty, almost self-destructive lens.

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