Album Review: Faithless – Champion Sound
2 min read
Faithless’ Champion Sound is a four-sided album, where each side provides you with a series of different soundscapes and moods. Right from the opening moments, the album kicks off with Forever Free where you hear warped synths, angelic chords, and the last recorded vocals of Maxi Jazz. There’s something deeply moving in this start. It’s a short, reverent entrance that makes you feel memory and movement braided together. Next, we move into In Your Own Groove featuring L.S.K., which is a more upbeat, disco-inflected track that urges you to let go to the music. The contrast between these two tracks ultimately set up the overarching concept of Champion Sound as it progresses – a theme of reflection and release.
Fugitive is one of the record’s darker, more cinematic moments with slow burning synths, atmospheric groove and introspective layers. Peace And Noise follows, a great track that brings the introspective thought flow from Fugitive into a conversational dance piece featuring Suli Breaks. This track boldly explores life’s deeper questions.
The middle continues to run deep through a series of tracks that tell stories. Meeting, Driving and Thinking with Amelia Fox and Nathan Ball comprise of them trading lines over builds full of warm pads and careful percussion. These songs feel like late-night vignettes and, in a way, let you inhabit both loneliness and togetherness simultaneously. They’re like club tracks that double as quiet confessionals. Then comes the album’s more meditative side with the Book of Hours, a long, atmospheric piece that drifts, simmers and builds. You get strings, intricate breaks and ambient moments – it’s a piece that’s less about the body moving and more about the mind wandering.
The closing side to Champion Sound welcomes you back to the dance floor. Find A Way and the pop leaning Dollars And Dimes with Bebe Rexha deliver memorable hooks and singalong moments while the title track, Champion Sound, is a nod to Faithless’ past work. Tucked into the fourth closing side you’ll also find Emmanuel. A quieter, reflective piece with a feeling of communal warmth that reads like a small benediction. The last track of the record, Yes I Want It Too, reignites movement with its Afro-trance roots. It feels both nostalgic and fresh.
Champion Sound is ambitious in structure and generous in feeling, it’s a four part odyssey that refuses to be only one thing. Riding the wave of mood and emotion that this record offers through dance-floor anthems and reflective soundscapes makes it a fabulous listen from start to finish.
