Matthew Herbert's Plat du Jour is an album of dance tracks united by the theme of food. Herbert has made a name for himself as a producer from collaborations with Róisín Murphy and Björk, but Plat du Jour is a different kettle of fish, a personal project that has taken a couple of years to devise and record. As the opening track makes clear - it's called 'The Truncated Life of a Modern Industrialised Chicken' - he is obsessed by the ethics of eating. In its idiosyncratic way this is protest music, but there's only one actual song on the CD, the perversely catchy 'Celebrity' ('Go Gordon/Go Ramsay/Go Beyoncé/Go Beyoncé. . .').

LRB 15 December 2005 | PDF Download