Under The Flightpath - Darren Price
After flying out of Heathrow Airport more times than I can remember I can certainly understand why Darren Price decided to use it as subject matter and the theme for an album. It's a gigantic sprawling center for people who want to go somewhere, and like anyplace with so many people it generates an energy that is palpable.
Like his music it's busy, very busy, and bustling full of variety, energy and purpose. The first four tracks on the album certainly help generate the feeling of time out of place, the feeling that the journey has begun but you haven't quite gone anywhere yet.
By the time you reach Counterpoint you're certainly on your way. The pace is as frenetic as the preceding tracks but by now you know where it's taking you. Followed by Intermission, complete with classic high energy dance fills and percussive markers it builds without ever peaking, a hallmark of the DJ generation, treading the fine line between either reaching the peak, which means having to turn around and go back to bummer town, or maintaining a sort of high for as long as possible without becoming terminally boring.
Born in Woking, England, Darren Price has been mixing for several years now, appearing as official DJ for the recent Underworld '96 World Tour, so it comes as no surprise that Under The Flightpath, his debut album, is a full on relax free zone. It's also relatively devoid of the "endlessly repeating riff and nothing else" effluents that poured out of every radio everywhere in late eighties Great Britain.
Rating - 703,822 (out of a possible 1,000,000)
