★★★★☆
On his sophomore sojourn, Alix Perez goes round the club, making sure light fittings and bar stools are tightly secured, handing out business cards as a sub-bass handyman with a utility belt full of low-end detonators. Balance is everything to the Belgian, simultaneously weighing up light and heavy within tracks, halving the album into migraine makers and the curiously afloat, and the neon-streaked against the pitch black for club cravers versus headphone retreaters.
Surgical scales become a must when calculating glitch, dubstep, hip-hop and drum & bass as a liquid synthesis armed with megaton weight, where “Playing Games” prepares to dive into Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools” as the essence of grace under fire. The velvet-crunched “Broken Heart” is up to splashing daintily to a Destiny’s Child sample, charming you amidst maximalist foliage; “Annie’s Song” capitalises on synth elasticity for an R&B wind and grind, and “YDK” slides into post-dubstep with ease.
Laser-guided bunker transmissions “Shadows” and “Move Aside” completely blow the hypercolour off the map, though one gripe is that the gargantuan bass can spread itself too thin. Despite running as a logical multiple threat, unhealthily grimy hip-hop slugger “Monolith,” featuring UK heroes Foreign Beggars and Jehst, shares the same subwoofer lawlessness as “Villains 1 Heroes 0,” “Blueprint” and Phace & Misanthrop scrap “Burn Out.” Why change the swing of a wrecking ball doing its job though? And because of the contrasts working with and against one another, Perez prevails.
File under: Noisia, Spectrasoul, Lapalux