Matthew Herbert's new album "Scale" is easy to like. His signature arrangements of accessible house-inflected beats behind jazzy melodies are polished to a glossy sheen. Strings swoon. Horns sound lushly. Songs like the soulful "Moving like a Train" or "When We Are in Love" positively slink out of the speakers.
But while Herbert is a master of creating seductive surfaces, he is also one of music's most critically acute musicians. In his live performance titled "Mechanics of Destruction," he literally destroyed products of mass consumerism such as a pair of Gap Jeans or a Big Mac and mixed the resulting sounds with keyboards and drum sounds to make sinuous dance music. "Plat du Jour" (2005), the most aggressively experimental of his records, used "sounds from the food chain" like the frantic clamor of a battery chicken farm as its sonic palette.
With "Scale," Herbert's fifth album under his own name (he also records techno albums as Dr. Rockit), his politics may be more oblique, but they nonetheless form the foundation of the music.