Available on: Bad Boy / Interscope LP

Sean Combs has long been the focus of people’s disdain for one element of hip hop or another. Whether it was the supposedly risible fusing of rap and r’n’b or casually appearing with a smirk on every record he came in contact with, he seemed to have the innate ability to get people’s backs up whatever it was he was involved with. I’ve long held the opinion however that there’s more to the man than meets the eye – it’s hard to dispute his keen ear; he was after all the man who brought Biggie Smalls to the world outside of Bed-Stu and with a production credit on ‘Hypnotize’, even if that means he just stood around in the room when it happened, it’s still more than most producers manage in a lifetime.

Last Train To Paris arrives after years of experimentation and false starts. It is a well-documented fact that Combs fell in love with house music somewhere and somehow (I blame Ibiza), but his collaborations with Felix da Housecat, DJ Hell and Deep Dish have been a mixed success. Thankfully, the neon-frazzled electro sounds he’s been pushing for near-on five years now have been almost perfectly realized on this surprisingly lean hour-long effort. The sickly trance of lynchpins Paul Van Dyke and Tiesto is slowed down and re-framed as something melancholy and almost pensive. Bleating electro-house synthesizer lines and over-compressed 4/4 beats become a Solaris-like memory of clubs and parties past, and who better to ponder this than Diddy, a man who is used to bathing in his own aura.

Anyone familiar with Combs’ output probably won’t be too surprised to hear he is not alone in this venture. Indeed, ‘Diddy Dirty Money’ is billed as a new ‘band’ of sorts, adding the vocal and songwriting talents of Dawn Richards and Kalenna Harper to the mix. Despite being a threesome already, there’s still plenty of room for Diddy to stretch out his hand to pretty much anyone worth a dime in the scene right now (and a few who aren’t). We’ve got Drake, Justin Timberlake, T.I., Trey Songz, Grace Jones, Usher, Chris Brown, Lil Wayne and even the ghost of Biggie himself cropping up for a verse or two. Strangely enough, amongst this sprawling rabble of talent, Diddy manages valiantly to rein in the egos, and a peculiar continuity arises from the skeletal concept.

Described as ‘train music’ by Combs himself, we have the Diddy character on a European trip, falling in love with and subsequently losing a mysterious (and changing) female character. His bravado and play-gangster stylings are as far from Last Train To Paris as you could possibly imagine; in fact the name itself, according to Combs, has nothing to do with ‘dirty money’ in the classic sense. This is to Combs a musical counterpart to Before Sunrise, albeit done with the kind of sleazy flicker you might associate with a central European strip joint. And while towards the end of the record things might get a bit overwhelmingly Will.i.am (‘I Know’), for the most part the record has just enough bottled up regret to set it apart from all its peers. The complex subtlety in the composition of tracks like ‘Yesterday’ and album highlight ‘Shades’ gives Last Train To Paris a quality that almost enforces repeat listening. A wise comparison might be Robyn’s self titled LP; the stark, smoldering elegance of ‘With Every Heartbeat’ sounds like a starting point for some of the producers here.

Somehow, and admittedly with a lot of help, Diddy has managed to come up with a record that sums up the era. Nostalgia, loss and trepidation is injected into a slow-burning dancefloor framework destined to burrow into the dark recesses of the mind. Hopefully this is the record where he will get the credit he really deserves, but then everyone’s too hung up on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy aren’t they? Here’s a dark fantasy that comes blissfully hype-free.

John Twells