Clark Sus Dog

(Throttle) ★★★★✩

GENERALLY speaking, we don’t expect dance producers to sing. Presumably, most of them would sound like a walrus having a colonoscopy if they ever dared to step out from behind their towering banks of buttons and wires.

Maybe it’s unsurprising then that St Albans producer Chris Clark had got into his 40s, with more than two decades of instrumental albums behind him, before it occurred to him to use his voice. So when

Alyosha opens this record — with Clark’s falsetto on its own, repeating the refrain “I wanna believe” — it immediately sounds like a different artist. A song such

as Clutch Pearlers still has the kind of pacey beats and snaking, fast-moving synths of his earlier work, but his voice is the focus, dominating it in both higher and lower registers.

It might be Thom Yorke who put him up to it. The Radiohead man is a long-time fan and they’ve remixed each other in the past. Here Yorke is credited as “executive producer” or, as he puts it, “a kind of backseat driver”, offering advice on how to step into the spotlight after so long in the shadows. And lo and behold, he sounds a bit like Radiohead, especially when his voice is as exposed and fragile on the closing ballad, Ladder. Yorke and Clark share vocals on Medicine and they aren’t far apart in style. Though Clark is still capable of sending his songs whizzing off in strange directions, this time it sounds like a human being is doing it.