Album Review: Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs - Trouble

Check out that cover. With only the skeletal remains of what was presumably a fancy dress dinosaur headpiece acting as a tight frame, a close up of hotly tipped dance-pop prodigy Orlando Higgenbottom stares unblinkingly, deathly pale – he is from the UK after all – and looking somewhat, yep, troubled. He might have signed to a major, but there's no cheering the bugger up.

Perhaps this choice of image is a subtle strategy to banish any preconceptions of wackiness that might be associated with the name Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, as Trouble is an impressively mature work. It may be his debut, but it feels more like the third or fourth album of an established career. Higgenbottom swathes from down-tempo bedroom electronics, to the glitzy retro-house of Your Love, to the liquid bass of Panpipes without any fuss or “look how clever I am” showiness. His cross rhythms snap together with the greatest of ease while his singing has a similarly understated quality, albeit with a bit of Chris Martin whine (sorry, the album title got me thinking of the Coldplay song). Particularly effective is the instantly electric Household Goods, wherein Higgenbottom croons passive-aggressive barbs at his unrequited love object over some mangled rave chords.

If there's an element of anti-climax here, it's that a number of the best moments have already seen the light of day on earlier EPs. Otherwise, it's a very polished, well-rounded effort that should have fans of SBTRKT and the like flocking around bassbins like honeybees.