Scale

With his new album Scale, restless musical innovator Matthew Herbert has produced his most accessible and mellifluous song collection to date. In just a decade as a recording artist, Herbert has become Britain's most inventive and prolific electronic composer, producing and remixing artists as diverse as Björk, REM, John Cale, Roisin Murphy, Yoko Ono and Serge Gainsbourg. On the surface at least, Scale is Herbert's smoothest and sweetest album so far. The overall tone is bright and opulent, the prevailing musical chatter a sophisticated conversation between luxuriant jazz, sumptuous disco and sensual house rhythms. In this grand ballroom of sound, silken ballads jostle for floorspace with syncopated, club-friendly tracks, while elsewhere, Herbert's deep roots in experimental electronica and musique concrete come to the fore. But Scale is much more than enjoyable. It is a sumptuous banquet of soulful pop made with integrity, intelligence and invention. Proof that, even in troubled times, the best music can be both playful and political, serious and sublime. It is all just a question of scale.