Better him than Black Eyed Peas, eh? Will.I.Am never came up with a line like, "Just sittin' here chillin' in the Batcave/ Whilst listening to Nick Cave/ Last night was a sick rave". In fact, that lively sliver of channel-hopping doggerel pretty much sums up Example. His lyricism has both cheese and cheek but is undeniably compulsive, laced with bubblegum hedonism. As for the music backing him, it's 21st-century electronic homogeny run riot - bangin' Euro-trance, dubstep, drum and bass, a dash of hip hop, soft-rock tropes, no shortage of melodies and big breakdowns.
Half-listened to, Playing in the Shadows sounds oddly familiar, the sound of the festival night heard while phased out back at the tent. The instrumentation on "The Way" or "Natural Disaster", half-heard, come on like a millennial prog house club at 3am - tune in properly, though, and the trimmings are tweaked to pure radio-friendliness. There's no Autotune, thankfully, but post-dubstep teen rave is the order of the day. Example is not a teen raver though, he's a shrewd, intelligent 29-year-old Londoner who's tried his hand at everything from film-making to stand-up comedy - and usually showed aptitude - but who has found his niche amongst the tsunami of Brit-hop-R&B-pop that currently sweeps all before it.
Despite punchy production from Chase and Status, Nero, Faithless, Skream and a host of other reliable clubland hands, Example's third album does nothing you don't expect it to. No tune leaps out and says, "OK, just for the doubters, here's a mad one," like, say, "Look at Me Now" from Chris Brown's recent album. Perversely, however, where the rest of Chris Brown's album was unlistenably dire, Playing in the Shadows is full of likeable, ephemeral tuneage, punctuated with the occasional shouty dubstep rocker such as "Wrong in the Head". Actually, catch him live, that's where the action is.
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