Music Reviews

Album Review: Murphy Jax / ‘Teleport: Echo City’ (Chiwax)

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Murphy Jax Teleport Echo City

★★★★☆

The spirit of ’88 lives strong, the clean, acid-dropped sound of original house is in season, and the heeding of promised lands and requests from baby to ride show where Murphy Jax’s head has been at for all these years.

As beats beam in a crux of keyboards, in no way should this be deemed cheesy, even when reaching further back to starship trooper disco on “Conrad’s Time Machine.” As the Berliner sells himself as a renaissance man for synth-strobe guidance and doughty drum machines giving the future a made-to-last guarantee, when “Empire Without End” and “We and The Machines” take on all decades, MJ becomes enduringly influential, twofold.

If have made your peace with the record being a spangled throwback, the startle of Euro techno steamroller “Dark the Dancer” will have you promoting the protagonist to all-rounder status, and acid toughening “Funksquelch” repositions you in an army-style crawl. Handclap jacks hit the gutter as the distinctive pump of the album’s glamour moves between pleasuredome (see the balladry of “Odyssey of Endless Hope”) and dingy bolthole. About the only thing missing is a lyrical accompaniment; there’s scarcely an unsubtle/subliminal drug promotion, suggestive breathing pattern, bid to free your mind or king’s speech on who’s house you should have jacked in to be found.

Zomby’s hardcore homage Where Were U in 92? becomes a comparison. Beyond epochal worship or knowing retro is always on-trend, it’s a new set of sounds superlatively re-piecing together all of yesterday’s parties.

File under: Mike Dunn, Legowelt, Terry Farley

Album Review: The Field / ‘Cupid’s Head’ (Kompakt)

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The Field Cupid's Head

★★★★☆

Bowled over, lurching towards danger, a thrillseeker slash foolhardy dancefloor voyager, The Field will not excuse himself for kissing the sky. Unflinchingly long and straightforward synth lines unfurl to take over stadia at a canter. A trance distillation lacks none of the genre’s powers of affirmation. Duplication unto infinity scuba-dives for pearls of dream house and cerebral techno, until its natural, unfettered drift takes it into shark infested waters.

Spread over a mere six tracks means Axel Willner works the headswims so their pendulous swirls place you on their path to ascension, if not always enlightenment. The title track hazes up and down through a loop trigger marking an uncertainty between fantasy and reality, and “No No” is a dramatic triumph of reshaping El-P’s “Stepfather Factory.” Provocative with the most scant of tools, an almost academic prowess is found rounding up a troupe of fallen angels.

The sweet “Black Sea,” keeping with the aquatic analogies, happily laps up the waves before, without warning, something sharp starts nipping at it from below. After spending the album’s majority perched on an exalted pasture, proceedings are moved from open air chill out to gasping techno asylum on a two-for-one deal.

Considering the Swede overcame a degree of writer’s block to get this album underway and still dices with production genius and everything fortunately falling into place, his maintenance of control keeps cool when under pressure, and more importantly, makes the ever-steady interesting and inspirational.

File under: DJ Koze, Loops of Your Heart, Walls

Compilation Review: ‘Producer 08: Makoto’ (Good Looking)

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Producer 08- Makoto

★★★☆☆

Celebrated Japanese technician Makoto Shimizu has run with the best in d’n’b down the years, tailoring a fluidity that sometimes plays like an audition for a Guy Ritchie movie. Completely getting the Good Looking aesthetic — the liquid nature of “Innerself” and such races effortlessly with an acceleration approaching a vanishing point — the visualization of the Progression Sessions peacemaker is one of exiting inner city life for the countryside and open road beyond.

Beginning with ultra casual, live translatable funk that’s all drop tops and coffee shops, the collection starting with a motivation for nothing more than the laid-back is something you’re actually hoping this album can’t sustain. Given the cold fresh air that’s forecast, it isn’t really a case of easing you in either, more like swapping your comfy time-killing latte to a swift round of espressos. The jazz-backed, dapper suited, surround sound-flicking drum & bass is as much about unwinding as winding your waist to, although “Enterprise” provides energetic jungle breaks for an easy rough-smooth contrast and an instant old skool flavour not just plundering mid-late ’90s D&B IQ.

Arguably Makoto’s control is for those who might class themselves as d’n’b fans from afar; it undeniably fosters its own fading into the background by its sense of the dreamy and spacious being too neat and tidy. It finishes as it starts, with barely a sweat gland exposed.

File under: EZ Rollers, LTJ Bukem, Eveson

Album Review: Washerman / ‘Raw Poetry’ (Drumpoet Community)

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Washerman Raw Poetry

★★★★☆

Silky smooth house. Purity. NYC and Chicago blooms in its family tree. Gianni Siravo’s prose expresses a love for deep, beefy beats that have probably never heard of EDM. This is a declaration of war on all dancefloor suckers with a hot-stepping sequence of time honored hustles.

Of filtered stabs, uptown swing and on “Superstring” and “Sneaker Girlz,” piano melodies that can in no way ever be retired, the engineering of a to-the-break-of-dawn vibe barely yields so much as a clearing of a vocalist’s throat – raw poetry indeed. Siravo’s playbook is full of foolproof strategies: check the metallic bump of “Siren Chords”, “Distant Planet” as a little dubbier and techier, the coloured skies of ambient forecaster “Belts of Orion”, and the Robin S bass of “Celestial Spheres.” Presumably when hitting the DJ booth Washerman brings both headphones and a clipboard.

A record solely concerned with restoring traditional values forces imagination and innovation into a weirdly negative playing of second fiddle (though perhaps in part to a self-imposed containment of equipment and technology). It sounds ‘right,’ yet the clubbing becomes hard to describe in terms other than dutiful. The reality is an album that rarely lets you down. Fluid to the max, Washerman has the stamina to go on and on, meaning if you’re buying out the bar or have new dancing shoes you wanna show off to everyone, he’s with you every step of the way.

File under: Boo Williams, Apollonia, Dexter, M@W