Rhythm and Stealth is a brooding onslaught of electronic wizardry. From the streetwise raps of Roots Manuva on ‘Dusted’ to the Afrika Bambaata throwdown of ‘Afrika Shox’ to the spectral beauty of ‘Swords,’ this swan song from one of England’s techno supergroups is the final statement on 20th century electronica. Unlike 1995’s Leftism, Leftfield‘s popular first album, 1999’s Rhythm and Stealth was a jagged, and austere artifact in its first impressions. At its core was still Neil Barnes and Paul Daley’s unmistakable blend of thundering techno, dub science, hip hop beats, house rhythms and punk attitude. Yet their approach was now deeper in its studio precision, more beguiling in its sonic tricks, and in the end far more Detroit, than Ibiza.
On the eve of the album’s release, the pair sat down with Keith Cameron in Amsterdam for the New Musical Express. NME’s assessment of the sky-high expectations around Rhythm and Stealth described the stakes as well as the contradictions at the heart of Leftfield’s success. Leftism had helped set the paradigm of ‘90s techno on the radio; its infectious melodies and grooves along with its collaborations with singers, reggae scatters and poets, inspired a whole generation of ascendant producers. The term “progressive house” was first used to describe their style, particularly their ‘Hard Hands’ remix of Barnes’ ‘Not Forgotten’ classic. Was Leftism their peak?
“To 1993, when Leftfield’s steadily burgeoning reputation as two men forging a very modern and very British kind of house music — one both epic and ethnic, blissed and belligerent, cuckoo yet conscious — reached its apotheosis with ‘Open Up,’” Cameron wrote with an apt sense of drama — “the techno-punk crossover anthem to begin and end them all. Adding John Lydon’s apocalyptic caw to Barnes and Daley’s pounding trance know-how was the masterstroke that lifted the lid off clubland’s simmering pressure cooker and scalded the pop mainstream.”*
How indeed would they top it? Their answer was to flip it, taking them three years, including discarding almost a whole album’s worth of material as they searched for a new North Star, raising in the process a kind of shadow mountain. By removing, they kept the sound of the future moving, even if instead many could no longer see it. “We never really counted on the success of the first album,” Daley told NME. “I think that put a lot of pressure on us, dealing with that. Shit, all of a sudden we were famous! From being an underground thing into this mainstream world…It wasn’t a secret anymore…But you have to move on, and once you’ve done something you can’t change it back. You have to find a balance.”
That new balance loomed somewhere even deeper in their past, especially their love of electro hip hop specifically, and the darker synth punk of their youth — Barnes for example went to nearly every Joy Division concert in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. ‘Dusted’ is a perfect microcosm of this more stripped down fusion of the past and future. “It’s a hybrid we’re looking for,” Barnes explained. “That backing track for ‘Dusted’ is not like a hip-hop tune, the way it ended up. It’s a very strange, mad, distorted groove.” By going backward, they went forward. Under the shadow of success, they entered the paradox of time. By revisiting the history of their own rhythm, they cleaved the mountain open and slipped back into the night.
“This style is not free, this style is expensive alright!?” raps Roots to the rolling quaking groove of ‘Dusted.’ “Love of self I possess, through life to death…Face flat to the floor but I found the strength; To commence with a brand new sense of self; Euro-Zulu, comin' through; Tokyo train style, hip it to the crew!” — and the chorus swings to a snarling riff, “Down like dirt, man, we dusted, get up!” — back to the warping beat — “The choice is, there is no choice but to pursue it; Soul on the mind, mind on the soul; My struggle remains, but my inside grows…” It’s electro for a righteous moment.
Reference points of style and place fail to convey the album’s full genius though, which is hard to crack, ranging from masterful experiments in the percussive warping of space-time, to 21st century songs that beam melodies through prisms of echo like zigzagging lasers: the single ‘Swords’ is perhaps the perfect hybrid, as understated as it is devastating — soul sojourner Nicole Willis singing with steely scythes, “Danger in every corner, I have become pure water…I wear my sword at my side!” — future pop tripping into eternity. ‘Chant of a Poorman’ — featuring the reggae MC Cheshire Cat, raps “Mek we beat the bingi drum, mek we chant down Babylon” — and ‘El Cid,’ use reverbed drums and sharpshooting notes to excellent effect. Both drift in a sonic bayou — nocturnal dub submersed in shimmering tones and lit up by croaking, ricocheting zaps, deep in the peaty bog yet obliterating the trip hop morass.
‘Afrika Shox’ — what Mixmag dubbed an “electro-stormbringer” of “club-bound blood and cirtcuitry” — takes a two-note bass pattern and reverses it, sucking it back up into a trap door, then looping its hypercube heartbeat into an assembly line of Zulu Nation dreams. Scrawls of lightning flash over the horizon, lassoing the mind into its electric prophecy: “Let's get electrofied,” beckons Bambaata, “Cities of angels…The world is on fire, can I take you higher?” ‘Phat Planet’ is a metallic storm of funky change-ups and slapping high-hats that whip the air so hard they almost light the darkness like white hot torch flames. When the track climaxes with a searing drum solo, the beat booms back slightly after the downbeat with wicked inflection — depth charges running under firecrackers — resetting the vector points of polyrhythm.
More quietly, tech-house tracks ‘Double Flash’ and ‘6/8 War’ battle it out to head-tripping time signatures while ‘Dub Gussett’ dunks the psyche in a churning mental magma. Closer ‘Rino’s Prayer’ rises to a simmering Mideastern wail, a little goodwill before the epochal upsets of the coming years between East and West. Its sine waves build to a mountain peak with cymbal crashes bringing down the sky as Leftfield float us back down to a gentle throb, pondering their last prescient prayer for peace.
Adjacent to this monumental achievement was the tribal psychedelia of ‘Snake Blood,’ on Danny Boyle’s The Beach soundtrack, and their wily ‘Swords (Exit Mix),’ a perfect companion to the original stunner, with its delicious ethereal crunch. The pressure Leftfield was under would eventually break the band in two. It would take 12 years before Barnes returned with an acclaimed live show and album, Tourism. Then 16 years after Rhythm and Stealth, partnering with Adam Wren, Barnes would at last release a third album, Alternative Light Source, and in 2022, This Is What We Do.
Critics have in fact been kinder than fans, which keys into the enduring mystery surrounding Leftfield’s success and subsequent drift into obscurity. More dissonant at times, harder and more uncompromising — the post-Daley era has emerged more and more starkly as Barnes unplugged, showcasing his Kraftwerkian devotion with ‘City of Synths’ and his gnarly punk roots with Nottingham post-punk weirdos Sleaford Mods (‘Head and Shoulders’). Growers both, the post-millennial muddle of Leftfield’s later albums is best evinced by the brilliant ‘Universal Everything’ — its clearest bridge to Rhythm and Stealth — a light rising over the shadow mountain, and then setting.**
Rhythm and Stealth was a conscious redrawing of the Leftfield brand. “We wanted something rawer and more minimal,” Barnes told Sean Bidder for Urb magazine, in 1999. “I think if you’re striving to do something different then you’re going to put a strain on yourself,” added Daley. “I think you have to do that ‘something’ to produce something good.” Cramped by imitators and sick of hearing Leftism derivatives on everything from café soundtracks to the 6 o’clock news, Rhythm and Stealth was Leftfield’s return to basics, throttling their studio mastery into infinite insight.
But its meticulous minimal sound was a letdown for many. It was so stealth, it didn’t even register on some radars, for its lack of obvious hooks and less than joyful mood. Even among many musicians and tastemakers who loved their first album, it became controversial, including its legacy with Daley’s departure and the mixed reception of Leftfield’s latter work clouding the horizon of its deep spirited sound. Yet despite its counterintuitive nature, for the discerning ear, or perhaps the ready ear, Daley and Barnes’ last work together is an endless breath of fresh air. The album’s greatest triumph, ‘Phat Planet,’ immortalized in a Guinness TV ad with old school surfers, stampeding horses, killer crashing waves, and allusions to Moby Dick’s Ahab, foreshadowed Leftfield’s greatest explosion, its implications still unfathomed.
“This was never going to be Leftism Part Two,“ Calvin Bush wrote in his review for Muzik magazine, splitting the difference. “In the duo's recent interviews, one word keeps cropping up — ‘darker’ — and so it proves.…but there's a nagging feeling that Barnes and Daley have sacrificed the big picture in favour of the tiniest digital details. Leftfield have proved that they're still relevant. They’re just not as remarkable as they once were.” The expectations raging, it was as if Leftfield were running as silent as a submarine. Ironically, hearing them tell it, Barnes and Daley were almost resigned to the fact that their revolutionary rave moment had passed, not into the past, but into the timeless. Even their music video for ‘Afrika Shox’ was a “bust.” For without its darker plot, the album would never have caught all tomorrow’s future shock.***
”I was trying to think about things other than music and I thought I’d go shopping,” Daley explained to Lily Moayeri for Lotus Magazine, anticipating the box that many fans and critics would refuse to let them leave, dismissing Rhythm and Stealth as a disappointment or a musical sphinx that eschewed the faster easier joys of Leftism; if some receivers were scrambled by the new signal, then Leftfield were equally blocked. “I walked into the shop and they were playing Leftism, so I had to just get out,” he said. “Can’t get away from it, man.” Like a giant wave, decades on, that shadow haunts.
And yet, did they escape or did they not? Leftism still gets the most kudos from critics and fans alike. It captured the heady rave days from 1986 to 1996, and it was a chart smash. But its sequel is Leftfield’s true masterpiece — a flawless challenging work of art, built to outsmart the march of time. Listen closely and you’ll be hooked, never quite able to crack its bewitching code. It’s the stealth of rhythm, and wisdom.
Track Listing:
1. Dusted
2. Phat Planet
3. Chant of a Poor Man
4. Double Flash
5. El Cid
6. Afrika Shox
7. Dub Gussett
8. Swords
9. 6/8 War
10. Rino’s Prayer
*“The floodgates were open,” continued Cameron. “Dance music, from being a thriving cult that still prompted the occasional question in the House, became a mass phenomenon, co-opted into advertising, films and sports jingles, assimilated into the subliminal hum of modern living.” It’s easy to forget now just how important the work of Leftfield was in ‘90s Britain, before Daft Punk and its “EDM” children.
The ferment of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, and Glasgow acted as the critical compression system that transformed and accelerated electronic music from the original blueprints of German krautrock and British synth pop, and the urban funks of New York, Chicago and Detroit, from disco and hip hop to house and techno, into its current unstoppable momentum by way of Ibiza, Los Angeles, Berlin and what now seems like every corner of the Earth, where moolah alone allows.
**Although some critics were kinder than many fans, there were certainly some serious detractors. One in particular wrote a two-page critique in Q Magazine, giving Rhythm and Stealth a three out of five star rating while Leftism in that review was held up as a peak in ‘90s electronic dance music with nowhere perhaps left to go. Except that review it turns out was by a fan more than an objective-minded critic. As Daley explained to the journalist Barry Glendenning, when he was asked about the imbalance between Leftism’s reception and its darker sequel, he relayed:
“I've a great story about that, actually. A friend of mine knows the journalist who wrote it, and the day after my friend read that review he said he saw the same bloke walking down Oxford Street wearing a Leftfield t-shirt! So, y'know, he can't dislike us too much. Then again, maybe all his other shirts were in the wash that day."
While I greatly respect Calvin Bush, who gave Rhythm and Stealth five stars out of five, while basically saying Leftfield couldn’t outdo Leftism, I find a similar “nagging” theme in his review as well. It’s the same for Andy Crysell’s review in New Musical Express where he argues that while Leftfield escaped the “infinite loop” of their Leftism sound with Rhythm and Stealth, nonetheless, he begrudges its vision.
“Good things come to those who wait?” he wrote. “Well, a few good things, though not enough to warrant the wait. Leftfield might have escaped their infinite loop, but not without a loss of judgement. It wasn't specifically the 'newest' sounds we wanted. It was an album as angry, intense and emotional as Leftism. A task Rhythm & Stealth is up to periodically at best.” Unmoved, he gave it a much harsher six out of ten.
What I get from all of this is something of the immensity of Leftism as a crossover sensation that got a lot of UK critics as fans hopped up on the idea that it was better than it was. While Leftism has many great songs and captures a moment in time, it has more iffy moments, some of them not so timeless from a longer vantage.
In any case, when I reviewed Rhythm and Stealth for Lotus Magazine, it worked for me supremely well from my Californian context, headphones on, and little support for electronic music from radio or the press — at least nothing enduring or that was authentic. Rhythm and Stealth was punk and rebellious. And it still is.
As Daley noted in a different interview, “We knew the album was going to be more stark and electronic, it was the one thing we established early on. Kind of a reaction against Leftism. We wanted it to be different without losing our identity or changing into a different band.” For Leftfield, there was a bigger picture then…
A shadow world cometh in the form of 9/11, wars, plagues, and major economic and social disruptions. While the initial honeymoon of rave, the UK’s second “Summer of Love,” indicated a happier technological romance, in retrospect, was Leftism really the answer? For me, this is why Rhythm and Stealth is ever resonant.
Like a black prism, it both captures and amplifies light — sonic light — for like the work of Jeff Mills or Underground Resistance, and Photek as well, the commitment to drums — Barnes and Daley were both drummers — transforms space and time into something more warped and broken. No darkness. No light.
***Even the nervy director Chris Cunningham was felled by its spell, foreswearing music videos after one delay, reshoot, and mishap after another for ‘Afrika Shox’ — real big picture bollocks in a way given the cross pressures. Cunningham, who had made a name for himself as the director behind music videos like the Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’ and Bjork’s ‘All is Full of Love,’ would recede himself into the background as the mainstream re-absorbed big swaths of the underground.
The ‘Afrika Shox’ video in fact got little play in the US, where it was banned from MTV and most other stations over its dark sense of humor. “That video we made was like a dark comedy,” Daley explained to Glendenning. “It's not meant to be taken seriously. They sent us a list of reasons why they banned it: drug abuse, fear, loss of limbs, death, promotion of drugs, y'know.” Talking about stealth, he was committed.
To which Glendenning thankfully asked: were you surprised when it was banned? “No, we were expecting it, to be honest,” answered Daley in a devil may care kind of way — a theme that ironically runs throughout an album that was so obsessed over. “The first time I saw it I thought, ‘a lot of people aren't going to like this.’”
So in its own meta way, Rhythm and Stealth was a bust on many levels, and yet it was also “dusted,” checked, and tempered. That is, it was tough, dark, stark, and just as authentic as Leftism: but its shadow, its contrast, its truth. By 1999, the “party was over,” and the subsequent catastrophes of the early 21st century only proved it.
One can hearken back to their angry yet uplifting ‘21st Century Poem,’ but everyone learned that Lemn Sissay’s words were actually more true than most ravers imagined: our dreams “terrorized,” homes “set alight,” bridges and visions burned. Once the UK Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 passed, its effects wore in by 1999.
Rhythm and Stealth was about survival, about doubling down for the long fight. Its album cover of samurai armor in retrospect predicted as much. One more thing. I allude to The Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ with my play on Alvin Toffler’s concept of “future shock”:
‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ was Andy Warhol’s favorite Velvet Underground song. It’s about his Factory party scene. It’s about the dark and sad side of it as much as it’s about its colorful and crazy side.
And “future shock” is the concept of people becoming paralyzed or overwhelmed by the pace and power of technological change. Following the ‘90s, this too has proved true in so many ways.