Album Of The Week: AlunaGeorge Body Music

R&B is different in England. Some of it is that old, stereotypical British reserve, but a lot of other factors are at work, too. In the UK, the music doesn't have nearly the church pedigree that it does over here, and it doesn't have the same weight of historical importance; it's not struggle music, exactly. It's party music, dance music, but in different ways than the party/dance wing of American R&B. There's a huge Afro-Caribbean influence, since much of the UK's black population has West Indian family roots, and it also has a deep pedigree in what the critic Simon Reynolds calls "the pirate-radio continuum" -- which means it has a lot to do with dancehall, with rave, with jungle, with garage. The Notting Hill Carnival, the annual London street party where titanic sound systems fight for drunken passer-by attention, is a big thing, and it tends to blur all those different genres into one dizzy whole. British R&B was some of the first music I ever loved, since my pop-music awakening happened at age nine, during the one year my family spent just outside London. This was 1988 and 1989, and the most important American singers were guys like Michael Jackson and Bobby Brown -- rhythmic singers, singers who interacted with their newly computerized beats in hard, percussive ways. And at that time, the British singers who mattered the most were all women -- Lisa Stansfield, Caron Wheeler, Yazz, the Swedish-born but London-based Neneh Cherry -- who could cooly and calmly navigate those dance beats, sassing or purring their way through breakbeats without ever attempting to overpower them. Those singers weren't necessarily a part of anyone's avant-garde, or at least they weren't just that. They were pop singers, singers of songs that nine-year-olds screamed at each other in the bus on field trips. And Body Music, the gorgeously engineered debut album from the London R&B duo AlunaGeorge, is pop music in the exact same way.