Leftfield’s Neil Barnes reinvents himself – with the music that used to be so good ★★★☆☆

Neil Barnes of the British dance band Leftfield released a gratifying comeback album in 2015, after fifteen years of album silence. Then he went silent again, apparently because he was struggling with personal problems and became seriously ill. Barnes also learned life lessons during that period, he says in interviews. He taught himself to listen to music again and to completely change his own creativity. Making music like he did it for the first time.

It is remarkable that with his second comeback album This Is What We Do has yet returned to the dance that made him so influential and attractive in the nineties. You can call the dubbing techno with acid bleeps of, for example, the title track old-fashioned and not very original, but you can also see the new Leftfield as a confirmation of what used to be so good.

Leftfield brought dance and club music to the heart of pop in 1995 with the magnificent record Leftism. Barnes and his then music friend Paul Daley produced slightly menacing techno for the dance floor, hinting at Jamaican music culture, but with the excitement of rock that could also splash live from a stage.

In This Is What We Do once again hangs that pleasantly sultry, typical British rave and club groove, with which Leftfield, Underworld and, for example, Orbital wrote history in the nineties. The track is pretty grim Full Way Round, in which the snarling vocals of Fontaines DC’s post-punk figurehead Grian Chatten set the tone, alongside sawing bass synthesizers. Nice is also the return of Lemn Sissay, who made the classic record Leftism already provided with profound texts. In Making a Difference the poet complains about society, which is not changing for the better.

This Is What We Do is above all a feast of recognition, but also of ordinary dance fun. It’s good that Neil Barnes is back.