Author: Matt Oliver

Compilation Review: ‘Matt Walsh presents The Clouded Vision Experiment’ (Clouded Vision)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

★★★★☆

For ‘experiment,’ read: a house mix keeping you on your toes as it dips and drives between and round styles. UK face Matt Walsh and his Clouded Vision cronies are party-amped and ready to go overtime on your sinews. The science to making everything gel, with the label owning the dancefloor in a variety of correlations, is unafraid to stretch and stifle running times, and Walsh runs a tight ship for those that love the throb of the focused.

From the bossy acid-tech stomp of Walsh & Remote’s “Draco” to wiry glides, cool cats (My Favorite Robot, Red Axes), and Detroit-dyed workouts (DC Salas taking it back to “1988,” the seesaw bassline of Carreno Is LB that’s so effective it should be criminal), it’s a set pointing at those still hanging by the bar and telling them to get on with it. Tim Paris’ “Viking Love” and Damon Jee’s “Retronovo” are at the front of those wagging fingers with warning, though where the swashbuckling “White Rooms” from Raudive comes from is anyone’s guess, as tech-house peers over at deep house and vice versa. This is no singalong, it isn’t one long countdown to fireworks going off, yet hands won’t need any encouragement to clutch at the ceiling: a point hammered home by the synthetic heaven Chardonnay reaches on “The Church of Moroder,” switching up right til the end. Clubbers will find Walsh’s findings very satisfying indeed.

File under: Bozzwell, Snuff Crew, Daniel Avery

Album Review: Offshore / ‘Bake Haus’ (Big Dada)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

★★★★☆

If it’s a mini-album sitting in the cradle of glitch, attention deficit surely must dominate. But after the coolly grandiose trap stylings of opener “Breeze,” Ewan Robertson lays it on the line that he’s not your average de-constructor of laptop beats. Humanizing the point and click nature of such electronica isn’t entirely accurate, but Offshore is not hiding round corners or behind 8-bit stencils for anyone, preferring to take on instrumentalism and bass architecture with a purposeful, empowering stride.

Yes there are moments of straggly interference, passing skits of wires getting too close to one another, Brainfeeder fandom (“Name Brand”) and ideas that get terminated when just about to bloom – seize the footwork urgency of “Lifes Too.” Links between tracks are bamboozling and difficult. However, the meat of the program is melodically determined, bearing interestingly different textures such as the slide guitars running through the suavely lazy “Black Bun” and rerouting the indigenous for “Venom.” If you’re thinking of glitch and RPG games going hand in hand/hand on holster, then head to the pixel-built slickness of “Slip”, but Offshore sounds like he’s going around real castles on “Downer” and “Long Now” with medieval gallantry and a genuine interest in history.

Offering much more than expected in a meager 30 minutes, and with a full-length LP targeting next year’s diaries, Offshore shows himself to be head chef in hip-hop’s bleeping boiler room.

File under: Lorn, Rustie, Daedelus

Compilation Review: Pinch / ‘MIA 2006-2010’ (Tectonic)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

★★★★★

Shedding light on best kept secrets from the vaults and unveiling a host of poisoned chalices and doomed prophecies, Pinch pulls together a personal collection of dubstep and all its interpretations around with a phantomly presence casting spells over a host of A-list labels. Amongst the starkness, the uneasy stillness of night interrupted by land-carving tremors of bass, and the paying of respects to original sound systems (a dubtronic remix mystery of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), Tectonic spearhead Rob Ellis is between fearsome scaremonger and nonchalant puppet master, taking pride in pushing panic buttons activated strictly out of sight so as to up the anxiety tenfold.

Slow but sure will always win the race ahead of blasting brains all over walls (regardless of a few clips emptying on “Attack of the Giant Killer Robot Spiders”), although Pinch still un-sheaths a precision sharpness and cruelty that majors in camouflaging fear factors when stealing your soul away. “Cave Dream” is an underfed pet straining at the leash, the rework of 30Hz’ “Mutate(d)” reeks of bad blood, and “E.Motive” is simply gorgeously intense, leaving the stricken howling at the moon. The classic remix of Emika’s “Double Edge,” with its troubling dial tone made to break you down, is the eternal Tectonic knife edge, and only the brash vocals to his mix of “Rise Up” suspends the hush. The best possible to way to catch up on a stellar career that can only continue ascending.

File under: Loefah, Slaughter Mob, Ruckspin

Album Review: No Regular Play / ‘Endangered Species’ (Wolf + Lamb)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

★★★☆☆

Lounge electro-pop with its head in the clouds, meets a deeper burning desire to get on the dance floor, which turns into a pitstop from a galaxian cruise, and returns feet to solid ground. It doesn’t sound like a best of both worlds situation hatched between Greg Paulus and Nicholas DeBruyn, particularly when some hippish rap leaves its mark as well, but all works unexpectedly well in No Regular Play’s covenant of cool.

The Marcy Hotel-educated pair look to out-dreamy other groove fantasists, with “Nameless” draping over a cosmic chez-lounge, dropped back down to earth by the techno-toothed “The Answer” taking out mumbling jazz pianos. The title track keeps the breathy vocal function over forward deep house in its keenness to look/sound the most dapper, with the first interjections of rapped rhymes acting like heavies on the door making sure you’re enjoying yourself.

Reaching for the astral doesn’t make Endangered Species a sleazy listening experience, defying a not unreasonable expectation of the electro vistas being given a lick of the slimy. “Never Had Enough” is seductive, but makes gentlemanly intentions known, cruising in a hover car with its bubble down as it does. “Kickback” is funkily playful, sounding like a Digital Underground jam for the year 3012 before providing an alternate ending, and “El Dorado” is chic deep house with a killer stab of bass interacting with the falsettos. Fashionable, yet vibrantly in touch with the common ear.

File under: Dave Aju, Jack Splash, Soul Clap