Leftism

It was perfect timing for Leftfield. They'd built a huge store of goodwill for themselves at the start of the decade with bona fide club smashers that, for better or worse, set the template for progressive house. Tracks like "Not Forgotten" and "More Than I Know"—and their remixes for React 2 Rhythm, Inner City, Ultra Naté, Stereo MCs—laid down that steady pile-up of simple riffs that felt like a safety net beneath the ever-accelerating mania of hardcore. Prog would eventually become grossly overblown, but until late '92 it was all good fun. Leftfield didn't go that way, thankfully: through "Release The Pressure," "Song Of Life" and "Open Up" they kept what was charming about their original sound, and added drama without locking into the lazy formula others did. 

Leftism, then, really was bang in the middle of everything. And if that suggests "middle of the road," well, there was that, too. It became the default soundtrack of every student-shared house, every between-bands bit of Glastonbury, and, increasingly, every dinner party. Listening back now, it still pumps. But it's a palatable pump, with enough hooks and vocals to work as well over pasta as in a field at 4 AM. Funnily enough, the tracks that have aged best are the ones that pump least: the sensual Orb-like ripples of "Melt" and "21st Century Poem," the trip-hop lope of "Original," the endearingly ham-fisted attempt to fuse jungle and trance on "Storm 3000," and the wonderfully mature peace-and-unity cheese of "Release The Pressure." The 4/4 tracks that make up the skeleton of the album sound more dated, but they were never bleeding edge anyway. The album sounds as much like a raver's comfort blanket as it ever did.