Bangs & Works vol. 1 - Planet Mu
Some day in the future when your grandchildren are sitting round you and asking for another dubstep-based-night-out story, you’ll tell them that 2010 was the year that it started pretending to be other things. DJs have been disappointing ketted-up ravers everywhere by playing percussive house records, sparse techno, juke music you can’t dance to, and not enough Rusko. Right on cue, Planet Mu bring the latest mutation, in the form of ‘footwork.’
If you’re looking to sound knowledgeable, tell people that footwork is a sort of cut up, sped up variation on Chicago’s ‘juke’ - bass heavy ghetto house at 150-160 beats per minute. Happily it doesn’t sound like gabba, but more like little snippets of the everyday, chopped, looped and filled out with irregular bass stabs. Leg-ache rather than headache. Not many people produce footwork outside of the Windy City and, as always, Planet Mu is first to deliver this fresh export to us. Fresh to a British ear anyway - footwork has been around for almost 15 years now.
The experience of listening to footwork is a bit like having a big sniff of industrial solvent while sitting at the expressway intersection on a sunny afternoon, cars whizzing past you. Heavy and fast, every song is riddled with short repeated samples of parts of words and movie soundtracks, creating a rather intense experience. This is by no means music to play anywhere, but if you like such heavy hitters on Planet Mu’s label as Ital Tek, then you’ll love this.
The artists assembled on the CD comprise of better known producers such as DJ Roc and DJ Rashad, as well as young bedroom producers like DJ Nate. This makes different tracks range greatly in composition and overall theme, as well as in their use of samples and production techniques. These tracks will soon be playing at every good house party, so listen in!
In this day and age, labels like Planet Mu are a rare find - willing to experiment whilst having the means and the following to get the music out there. This CD split office opinion down the middle, and in these days of X Factor mediocrity, that’s no mean feat.
And the dance? Youtube it.
Tanlines - Volume ON
Did anyone say buzzband? This is a cheeky release. Or, more politely, it’s one for the collectors. A retrospective compilation of a band who haven’t even released an album yet, with only 2,000 copies and only available in Europe. Dude. If anyone can pull this off then it’s the uber-cool New York duo Tanlines.
Enough about all that though. This release consists of ten original tracks and eight remixes. The music itself is a mix of plum-wine style guitars, tropical rhythms, stabbing synths, and that droney singing style that has become so ubiquitous with male vocals from the Empire State. While its production can indeed be criticised for leaving more than a little to be desired, the quality and the catchiness of the tracks more than compensate for this. One of the most promising bands around, this collection of previously released tracks is an excellent way of generating some hype and expectation for their debut album which will follow next year. I am excited.
Laurel Halo – Kind Felix EP
Discordant floating piano riffs travel over drums that sound like they’ve been recorded through a thin partition wall, topped off with a vocal style that oscillates between the show tune-esque and the hymnal. I start to feel like I’m in a particularly rad Anglican church, where the preacher probably rides a skateboard and almost definitely has his naval pierced.
Despite lacking a concise generic name, this spangly-epic-lo-fi-chick-glitch-core type music can often feel much of a muchness. But at the same time, it is very difficult to dislike it. Tracks like the opener ‘Supersymmetry’ here offer a complex multi-layered sound, full of swirls, swells and considerable quantities of reverb. There is certainly something here, though it seems we may have to wait for further releases to fully understand what Laurel Halo is all about.
Kitsune Maison 10 - The Fireworks Issue
If you ever find yourself feeling nostalgic for the high times of electro and indie circa 2005 while you’re sitting alone in your room on a particularly rainy day, this album will bring a tear to your eye as well as warm memories of those day-glo trucker hats and sloppy, checkered-shirt ecstasy kisses flooding back to you. This 2-CD time machine will transport you straight back there with all it’s cool-kids party classics, ranging from the electro bangers of ‘Punks Jump Up’ on CD 1, to the chilled out yet slightly whiney indie of ‘Young Empire’ and the Morrissey-esque ‘Heartbreaks.’ Oh, the memories…
What was that - all these tracks are new? Jesus H Christ. Seriously? Meh.
Starkey - Space Trader Vol. 1 - Civil Music
Philly producer Starkey’s Space Traitor Volume 1 EP takes all the familiar gritty and grimy qualities of dubstep and replaces them with Daft Punk trade marked sci-fi geekery, to arrive at a sanitised, inane and unagressive sound. This release is certainly at the geekier end of the dustup spectrum, a far cry from his excellent ‘Ear Drums and Black Roles’ album released last April.
The EP is made up of six original tracks and five remixes, by an impressive roster including Rudi Zyggadlo and Ital-Tek. The majority of the tracks sound as though they could both get ‘em moving at an “edgy” student night, and feature on the soundtrack to a Disney film. The track ‘Holodeck‘ in particular sounds like it could have been composed to fit alongside an animation sequence of dancing, moustachioed daffodils and marigolds. But it is vocal track ‘Paradise’ ft. Anneka that is particularly irksome; despite its lyrics about Kerrigold Irish butter, it sounds like a track from one of those early noughties Air albums that everyone kindly chooses to forget. Closing track ‘Starkbot Beats,’ with its cheesy monologue about how Starkey is from outer space (trying to excuse this as a reference to Sun Ra only makes it worse), settles this record as one aimed at little kids who ride skateboards and wear 59fifty hats with superman logos.
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