Plat du Jour

As with most things this conceptual, certain aesthetic sacrifices must be made. But Matthew Herbert is the remarkable musician, with his keen senses of rhythm and melody, who can pull off such an audacious ruse.

These are what protest songs can sound like, feel like and taste like in the 21st century. [#257, p.52]

Once you've digested the background information, tracks that seem slightly twee and aloof spring into focus. [Sep 2005, p.100]

Throughout the album, the juxtaposition of Herbert's precise, seemingly innocent and light-hearted rhythms with heavier themes of economic exploitation and death creates an effective and practical dialectic.

Certainly, "Plat De Jour" is one of the most ambitious records that will be released this year.

Plat du Jour is a more interesting an outing for remaining ambivalent in spite of itself.

With Herbert, I've always been happy to consider the political content of the records to be a clever bonus, while the music as a purely sonic experience is allowed to stand on its own. I listened to Plat du Jour five or six times without paying attention to the song titles and not having read the online methodological descriptions, and this one didn't hold up quite so well.

Parts of Plat Du Jour sound hokey and fussily arranged in ways that lack the intimacy and luminosity of Herbert's past highpoints. As experimental compositions with a point to make, however, the better tracks bounce around questions that linger after the liner notes are filed away.

Plat du Jour is never dull, and if you went your whole life not knowing what it was about you could enjoy it on a basic scale. But as a project, the record is somewhat of a disappointment.

Plat du Jour is no great aesthetic success (it is too spotty and inconsistent) and its discursive dogmatism can border on sledgehammer browbeating. Nevertheless, Herbert does ask questions no other artist is wont to pose; for this, he commands our respect.