** 4 Hero

TWO PAGES

(Talkin' Loud/Verve)

With their landmark single, "Mr. Kirk's Nightmare," 4 Hero's Mark and Dego, archivists who also record as Tek 9 and Jacob's Optical Stairway, kickstarted a big bungle in the jungle in 1989. Back then, the genre's heady ricochet of unstoppable rave beats, supersonic bass, and ruffneck reggae was the provenance of pirate radio and secretive, white-label 12-inches. But now that jungle/drum 'n' bass is the stuff of car commercials, 4 Hero are no longer on the outside looking in.

Two Pages, the duo's US debut, charts jungle's progression from guerrilla music to mainstream respectability, where "respectability" means jazz dilettantism, unnecessarily complex time signatures, and the use of backing bands. This may explain why the first half of the album so vividly evokes the nihilistic claustrophobic allure of early drum 'n' bass and the second so unnecessarily features a dispensable live outfit struggling to reproduce jungle's manic, cloistered sounds. Unfortunately, the jazzbo aspirations of tracks like the saxophone-laced "Universal Love" represent progress in the direction of blunting the urgency and dynamism of a music that was once ambitiously alien.

-- Patrick Bryant