Author: Matt Oliver

Album Review: Benjamin Damage / ‘Heliosphere’ (50Weapons)

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benjamin-damage-heliosphere

★★★★☆

While hesitating to use the word focused, Heliosphere is techno that seems more settled, even at its most aggressive, than when Damage gets together with partner Doc Daneeka. A uniter of calms and harbinger of storms, his dream casting banishes the velocity of when he’s at his hardest, taking a higher plain tenure that truly makes him the master of his own destiny. Benjamin O’Shea, a producer giving you bang for your buck and who becomes a locksmith sent to pick at the gates of 4×4 fury, packs lots in for a product that on the level is a relatively short and uncomplicated experience.

“010X” is a clipped shuffle that’s motorized with funky edges or vice versa, a dual arrangement that permeates the album the same as where deep can also mean headstrong. “End Days” is near enough post-dubstep, a cautious threat as much as it is a nicely nudged surprise to the left and with a valuable role to play in the album’s drifting through space – “Light Year” is techno at daybreak right the way through to nightfall – and subsequent plummeting out of orbit. And boy will you feel the Gs: there’s the Detroit head-clamp of “Delirium Tremens,” “Extrusion” tip-toeing through a Twilight Zone with lead boots on, “Spirals” cartwheeling down a black hole, and “Swarm” a slave to the metronome. On form, on target, and another 50Weapons fast start to the year.

File under: Sigha, Fear Ratio, Kevin McPhee

Album Review: Dosem / ‘Origin’ (Tronic)

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Dosem Origin Tronic

★★★★☆

Chill out, get on the floor, sit back down and relax, move some more, and so on. Dance music, and life, made simple. Dosem, whose name is only part pro-tranquilizing instruction, arranges swirling interludes and club prescriptions so focussed and straight up and down, it’ll be a schedule you’ll be shaping your Saturday nights around time and again.

Nice and funky with a calming influence (the weekend readier “A Modern Ritual,” “Black Unicorn” going deeper with immersive strength to swoon to), there’s no need for vocal flash cards. Observing the do-nots of EDM, it’s as if Marc Ramirez recognizes clubbers’ intelligence and spares the coaching on having a good time. In a down-to-earth dance floor set, the Spaniard takes to the booth, mind strictly on the job, and leaves a calling card of fundamental, fully loaded grooving, sultry by its tacit encouragement of winding waistlines. On top of that, swells of euphoria are brought to simmer (“Origin”), and Dosem’s available to dish dirt (the bitter acid of “Vesier”) as well.

Addressing the album’s two-part makeup, re-shuffle the downtempo cuts, anchored by the dubby headswims of “Rooftop Party” and “Future Noir,” and the club tunes, into mini collections, and both are complementary. Though Dosem does most of his work in the club, the need to kick back without it being a distraction is like he’s been told so by a personal trainer, taking care of your dancing feet in both directions.

File under: Sendo, Christian Smith, Technasia

Album Review: Tosca / ‘Odeon’ (!k7)

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tosca_odeon--300x300

★★★★☆

Vienna’s Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber have long been vaunted for classically chilled electronica and jazz brewed richness and riches. With an individual, rule-loosening edge that probably puts them in the maverick category, their admission that they’ve “always had a darker, ambient side” has Odeon waiting for nightfall in order to nurture an interruptive rebelliousness.

Kinking the suave sophisticates this time around are the brasher disregards of the rockier “Heatwave” heading out on an archetypal desert road trip, mild hallucinations followed by a blackness developing a stronghold on the sub-goth summons of “JayJay” and the punk-dance “In My Brain Prinz Eugen” that’s neither one thing or another. Tosca have gone from afterhours charisma to the taboos of the night, racked with insomnia (“Soda”) and shoegazing with bloodshot eyes once found romancing. “Meixner” searches for that debonair hush of old, but has become fonder of stonier, dubbier glances, again with a prairie twang, though “Cavallo” is a cinematic come-together, languidly enjoying a cigarette before closing time, leaving the audience patiently waiting rather than being made to flinch.

Gallic wispiness on “Stuttgart” steadies the ship and restores confidence in the ballroom, and taking to wearing hearts on sleeves, the crestfallen waltz “Bonjour” circles like a done-for music box. It sums up the album wrestling with burden, sometimes with good grace, others when not giving a damn, favoring the somber over smiling or soul-touching.

File under: Metope, Fila Brazillia, Maria Minerva

Read our list of 125 dance/electronic albums to look for in 2013 here.

Album Review: Applescal / ‘Dreaming in Key’ (Atomnation)

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Applescal Dreaming in Key

★★★★☆

Three albums already under his belt and only 24, Pascal Terstappen begins his next as a laboratory observer of dancefloor variables, and finishes as a peak-time club patriot able to massage your mind alongside. Out of scientific and clinical, Appelscal works with breakbeat plots and rewarding rollers, and spears ambient grooves so that the Dutchman lifts spirits at the same time as he shakes you up.

This becomes a feature, a calm framework featuring barb wire snags and a Technicolor out for the dancefloor, “Spring and Life” is deep house at its noisiest, partial to becoming a full-blown techno threat. “Wise Noise on Time” is another of calm passages set to prickly bass, like a scientist trying to breed opposing species, and the brilliant “Thanks for Fun” is a powerfully chorded yet oddly down in the mouth house cut. Both attacking yet uneasy, it could well cause definitive dancefloor moments of truth when the right lights drop. Those same chords form the basis of “Onetasker,” yet joy is taken from cyclical, luminous ambience following you around the room.

Terstappen carries on fronting up and falling back at the drop of a dime. “El Diablo” has potential to be another affirmative hit with its low furrowing bass building up a melodically Euro head of steam. “Vintage Clown Shadow Hunters” and “Keep on Dreaming” power down from inside a maximalist’s crystal diamond, joined by the bashfully sweetened entertainer “The Composer.” 2013 has its first one-to-watch.

File under: Extrawelt, Nathan Fake, Dan Snaith

Read our list of 125 dance/electronic albums to look for in 2013 here.