There's a longstanding tradition that an artist who starts their own record company will use it to sign artists in their own image: they don't call them vanity labels for nothing. So it is that the big signing to London-based commercial drum'n'bass/dubstep duo Chase and Status's MTA Records is the London-based commercial drum'n'bass/dubstep duo Nero.
The two acts share the same grasp of dynamics – which is one way of saying they they think subtle is a village in the Languedoc – but there's the distinct suggestion that Daniel Stephens and Joe Ray might have loftier ambitions than their sponsors. Earlier this year, they collaborated with composer Joe Duddell and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra on something dispiritingly titled the Dubstep Symphony. They're not the first dance artists to liken their album to the soundtrack for an imaginary film – recent figures suggest they're actually the 5,246th – but theirs comes with another concept attached. "It's set in the ficitional year of 2808," offered Stephens. "I personally hear this as a post-apocalyptic world trying to rebuild itself." As is so often the case with concept albums, the concept itself seems to run out of steam pretty quickly. It's a quicksilver analytical brain that's able to define the exact relationship between a post-apocalyptic world trying to rebuild itself and, say, recent single Promises: "You got me so wild, you got me so high, can't you see it in my eyes?" etc.
But initially at least, you can hear what they're driving at. Welcome Reality opens with two minutes of portentous synthesiser chords. The subsequent Book of Harmony nearly knocks itself out trying to create a mood of dark foreboding. It has vast brass fanfares, a film-trailer voiceover, disaster-movie strings, lashing rain, a dramatic sample from John Adams's Harmonielehre – a classical piece inspired by a 1911 study of tonal harmony by Schoenberg that married the developmental techniques of minimalism with Sibelius and Debussy's fin-de-siecle Romanticism, and, perhaps more pertinently, featured in the video games Civilisation IV and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – all interspersed with a voice that keeps saying "doomsday". Unfortunately, the voice that keeps saying "doomsday" sounds exactly the same as the one that says "bonkers!" on the Dizzee Rascal track of the same name, which, with the best will in the world, rather undermines the atmosphere of apocalyptic dread.
Even when the concept heads west, however, the sense of artists striving for a certain grandiosity is unmistakable. There are a lot of distorted synth effects derived from Joey Beltram's 1991 rave classic Mentasm, but they exist alongside sounds that recall an earlier musical era: the quasi-classical solos of Fugue State; Guilt's approximation of the synth sound that noodles away on Pink Floyd's Shine on You Crazy Diamond; the frequent hints at the kind of widdly solo that traditionally emanates from behind a bank of keyboards, whence lurks a man in a cape playing a Mini Moog with each hand; not one but two interludes where the dubstep rhythms give way to something that sounds suspiciously like a drum solo. In the unlikely event that any sixtysomething Yes fans are listening to an album by a commercial drum'n'bass/dubstep duo, they'll feel a warm glow of recognition. Of course, plenty of dance producers have referenced the era of the double-necked guitar and the Roger Dean gatefold sleeve, but it's hard to think of anyone who's tried to cram this kind of thing in among so much distorted rave-influenced noise. They're the Prog-idgy.
Despite all the prog allusions and big concepts, it turns out what Nero are really good at is something all the prog allusions and big concepts suggest they might disdain: pop music. Welcome Reality's highlights invariably involve Stephens's girlfriend, vocalist Alana Watson. It's not just that Nero can write melodies, although they can: big, hook-laden tunes you find on My Eyes or Must Be the Feeling. It's that they come up with intriguing ways to present them. Guilt takes a euphoric hands-in-the-air breakdown and stretches it into a song: the effect is both familiar and slightly dislocated. Scorpions sets Watson's densely effected vocals against a huge, echoing guitar solo. Her voice on Crush is pitched so high it recalls the sped-up R&B samples that permeated hardcore in the early 90s; what's going on behind it, meanwhile, sounds like a mid-80s freestyle track unraveling amid a series of atonal electronic honks and squeals. Then, unexpectedly and rather thrillingly, everything shifts: what appeared to be a whole track turns out to be merely an abstract intro to a Day-Glo, wildly commercial song. You listen to it and think: these two could be genuinely amazing, innovative pop producers, something the world perhaps needs more urgently than a quasi-classical dubstep track called Fugue State. Whether that's what Nero want to be, however, is a moot point.
