Compilation Review: ‘Aquasky presents Bring The Ruckus’ (Passenger)

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★★★☆☆

Bass — a twin stroke turbo of skidding past your ears and shuffling your vital organs. Booty-hunting ragga — brought in to hype the party until the cops shut it down. And dusty dub — sent bouncing into a saw-toothed spotlight. Even if you think it’s a 19-track statement featuring a lot of familiar sounds, faces and samples — as big a rush as Bring the Ruckus provides, there’s no denying some same old stories — it seems to be filling a nice gap between EDM and bro-step through its big dipper of BPMs. See The Autobots & Dead Audio joining forces to get hands raised, and MadRush’s “Get Ya Vs Up” creating an elbow-skinning sea of two-fingered salutes.

Hectic yet schooling some of dubstep’s in-yer-face projectiles when the likes of RadioKillaz add the rave string to the bow, breaks shouldn’t start marketing itself as some intermediary third wheel. EDM’s sap and smiley simplistics aren’t up for discussion either. Rennie Pilgrem’s fireball “One By One” heads a pack constantly breaking the back of wack parties and revelling as the energy drink-mainlining renegade, with 601’s “Strobelight” looking for the nearest china shop to clatter into. Aquasky remind everyone of breaks’ energy levels that are never found dropping to show it won’t get left behind in the bass trends race. That title repels what others throw at it, creating some fearsome bottom end monsters as retaliation.

File under: Far Too Loud, Black & Blunt, Breakfastaz