★★★☆☆
Anyone who took Metafiction with them to either a darkened room or a deep bath knows that DFRNT isn’t one to shift the goalposts once he’s made his mark. Repeating the surround sound vistas, sunken treasures of bass and sense of inching towards its target by way of ambience with hidden horsepower, Alex Cowles has no intention of changing his persona as the strong silent type. Get comfortable and let him begin, through dubstep burials, misty dubtronica, deep techno and the spaces in between tied together by that essential low-slung stammer, making jagged icicles move over your skin in a softened trickle.
“That’s Interesting” will bring you back from an arching dizzy spell with its rather odd use of a sample of Alicia Keys chatting up Mos Def over an arctic house paradise swirling sumptuously, and the synth-bass cutting through “Incubus” gives a new edge of life. DFRNT is as rigid as he is boundless, with the deep house stencil “Deep Into It” and eleven minute opportunity to look at yourself through “Prism,” lending debate, which runs album-long, as to whether it’s a characterless trudge masked as an expertly constructed skate through relaxation. Fading is never a state DFRNT finds himself in — it’s for when you the listener is flagging and needs gently shaking that the Scotsman carefully makes his way to the front.
File under: Darling Farah, DeepChord, Rob Sparx