Album Review: Bambounou / ‘Orbiting’ (50Weapons)

★★★☆☆

Though it’s been a bit of a mixed bag for albums with 50Weapons this year, you know they’re not a label who’ll finish the year quietly. Jeremy Guindo as amateur astrologer Bambounou takes the manipulation of bass to every corner of the universe for the good of speaker harm, putting in the air miles/light years towards a mildly spacey theme throughout his debut LP.

This manipulation makes for a clipped low-end spectrum masking a sometime identity crisis/any bass is good bass theorem. From the off, “Any Other Service” can’t decide whether it’s garage, footwork, dubstep or an unclassified wobbly bass form that’s flicked through the techno family album, yielding the more straightforward beating of “Data.” There’s definitely some 2-step and grime running through “Capsule Process”, though Guindo is up on leaving the beats open ended for all to interpret; and again, he ceases splitting infinitives to then lay down “Splaz,” a work of quicksilver Detroit techno.

Held together by minimalist gravity in no particular order, it’s unclear how KRS-One would react to being chopped into a booty-seeking footwork track, but it’s definitely the Blastmaster holding down “Let Me Get”. Then there’s the maximalist approach taken for the very Jam City “Great Escape,” jerking the flow in discovering new existence, and a homage to the space/electro continuum on “Challenger.” Bambounou sees as many bass opportunities as there are stars in the skies – a thoroughly modern mishmash.

File under: Addison Groove, Sully, Starkey

Matt Oliver

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