Review: Kay-D - Sapphire

Kay-D is another one of the Mistiquemusic mainstays, and Sapphire is another Mistique prog album. Like Bvdub before him, Kay-D featured on my 2010 list with an album not awfully dissimilar to this one, and like Bvdub I was expecting a case of diminishing returns. I was also expecting another one of those "web label dance albums" I've been talking about - see also the reviews of Arctic Night, Magnus and Scenic & Advisory.

To an extent, Sapphire is totally one of those albums. His previous albums were too. And yet, I actually begrudgingly do really like this album, even if it is way too fucking long and doesn't really have any structure or purposeful order to the tracks. They're just really good tracks for the most part, in quite a varied way. His early stuff on Mistique was basically straight-up progressive trance at the new prog tempo of 128bpm (instead of 132bpm ten years ago), albeit extremely good and a bit of a throwback. Since then he seems to have slowed down even more (a few tracks are closer to 125) and cut out a lot of the driving hi-hat momentum in favour of a really chugging, bassy sound. Some of the basslines on this album are absolutely massive. Enormous. This is real early-in-the-night dance music, almost throbbing ambient music, definitely not the kind of stuff you can just speed up to 133 and rewind back to 2002 when Sasha was last genuinely good. I don't know if I'd actually dance to this in a club, but I'd certainly be glad to sit/stand hearing it if I'd actually turned up before midnight for once.

So there is evolution of sound here, and more importantly there are enough top quality bassy prog groovers to keep you coming back after the first listen. A couple of the tracks make for appropriately evolving super-long journey tracks,most notably Tonight with its processed female vocal, and the never-ending Internal Voice which starts off breakbeat and morphs into 4/4 halfway through. My favourite tracks, however, are slightly more concise. There's the brilliantly named Vagrant Positron, with an operatic vocal sample that reminds me of Spirits Dancing by Coyote enough to get nostalgically positive. It also has a ridiculously supermassive bassline, the kind that makes your neighbours file court actions against you. Then there's Twisted Synergy with what sounds for all the world like an acid line from a slamming techno warehouse monster transposed to a prog track and slowed right down to 125bpm. Very unusual, but oddly brilliant.

So although this album commits a lot of sins I would class as elementary and unforgivable to most other artists, Kay-D gets away with it because he keeps on delivering the goods. Yeah, it gets a little boring to listen to such a long album that's all bass-y slow-mo prog, but you just can't keep tunes this good down. It's basically a straight fight between this one and Michael & Levan's album for Prog Long Player Of The Year, unless Guy J turns out to have played a blinder.

Genre: Progressive
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

Review: Bvdub - I Remember

Bvdub is prolific. That's the first thing you can say about this guy. He released something like 10 albums in 2011, which is absolutely ridiculous, and this is the only one of them available on Spotify. That's probably just as well, because Bvdub perfectly exemplifies my oft-stated theory that pleasant droney laptop ambient is seriously easy music to make. I haven't heard his other albums, but this one doesn't sound too different to last year's The Art Of Dying Alone, the only other Bvdub album I've heard. In fact, with one notable exception, it sounds almost identical. Now, he's obviously had a vast splurge of other music out this year so it's impossible for me to definitively state things about his overall sound and technique, but everything I've read online says these other albums are all pretty similar too.

I Remember is a lot of ultra-long, ultra-repetitive, loopy and droney pleasant laptop ambient. Sound familiar? Bvdub's one speciality seems to be in notably angelic, ethereal, transcendental sounds - he loves densely layered choral samples and other angelic light sounds, even though the overall mood of both the albums I've heard are extremely sombre. The Art Of Dying Alone was, obviously, an album about death, which explained the eerie transcendental sound and melancholic mood. I Remember isn't obviously themed around anything, but the musical content is pretty much the same, and the track titles are all pretty downbeat. Most of his albums appear to be pretty miserable, looking at Discogs. Brock Van Wey is clearly a bit of an emotional bastard, it seems. Cheer up man! Then maybe you'll stop remaking the same bloody record.

The one track that stands out from all this achingly beautiful but overall very samey sadness is We Promised, simply because halfway through you start to notice a distant techno throb behind all the choral tears-of-angels shit. Bvdub does also do a lot of dub techno (hence his name) and this track is the one thing I've heard from him so far that fuses his ambient and techno sounds together in this way. He's probably done this loads of times on other albums, because the idea appears here almost at random - halfway through the second track and never again on the album. Still, it impressed me because it's such an obvious fusion and yet it still works really well.

So yeah... yet another pleasant ambient album that probably isn't getting into the end of year list. Last year I put The Art Of Dying Alone in, because I was still fairly new to the world of blogbient, but you can't repeat the same trick and just throw a dub techno beat in at one point and expect me not to get a bit weary of the formula. The best stuff this guy has made is still his collaborative EP with ASC from this year, which was absolutely awesome.

Genre: Ambient
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

Review: Zomby - Dedication

Dedication is only Zomby's second proper album, which is a real surprise given the last one came out three or four years ago. Zomby is certainly not an artist who struggles for inspiration, the bastard. The Internet is awash with clips of stuff he has made and semi-shared. The guy infamously writes and then doesn't release billions of tunes. He claims to compose all the time, often merely on his laptop speakers while composing. A lot of the producers I know find it absolutely impossible to put anything together on anything but their studio monitors, fretting over bass clarity and mixdowns. Zomby doesn't give a fuck about that stuff. He'll throw something together on his laptop on a plane and polish it up later, the raw ideas being the important thing.

One listen to Dedication and you can figure out why. The longest track is 4 minutes, quite a few are less than one minute long. This isn't a guy who likes to develop his ideas too much. This is really a series of unfinished sketches. The whole album ends remarkably jarringly, almost as though he hacked the end off the waveform deliberately just to emphasise the point. The listening experience feels deliberately fragmented, as though fragmentation and dislocation are the intended effects of the record. Which is... interesting, certainly quite an arty approach, but is that merely a generous wrapping over a rather half-arsed present?

There's a wealth of ideas here - a lot of ambient chiptune things, some post-dubstep influenced things, even a (probably sampled) jazzy track at one point. But these are extremely undernourished ideas. The album gets away with sounding interesting because it's probably only got as many ideas as most albums fit into the opening five songs, and this way there's no requirement to make any of his doodles complementary. And so you listen to this oddly interesting album, tickled or intrigued by brief suggestions of brilliant ideas that go away as quickly as you've noticed them, and you get an overall sense of incohesion, of flittering ADHD. And at the end of it, with that ridiculously abrupt stop, I'm left thinking "Man, I'm glad I don't have ADHD."

Genre: Um...
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

(Serious) Review: John 00 Fleming - The 10th Life

(NOTE: I don't usually do single/EP reviews on this blog, although I guess there's no reason why I shouldn't. I haven't written a "professional" review for quite a while and this is basically my version of a serious, functional piece of dance music writing, the kind of thing you churn out week in and week out when you do this sort of thing properly. I wrote this for demonstrative purposes, but I figured I may as well throw it up here as well.)

John 00 Fleming’s first new release since the decidedly mixed bag that was his debut album 9 Lives is a self-declared return to the dancefloor. The 10th Life is a sweeping prime time progressive trancer with a swirling ambient intro, driving riffs and a tight, terse breakdown that gives you just enough time to peer over the precipice before kicking back in in banging fashion. Clocking in at a versatile 133bpm, this track is equally at home at the business end of a progressive set or early on in a full blown trance work-out, depending on which direction you slide the pitch. On the virtual flip-side, The Astrophysical Nebula does exactly what it says on the tin: a spaced out slice of lower-tempo progressive breaks primed for opening sets and adventures beyond the outer rim. The punchy percussion and gleaming synth timbres bring to mind classic Planisphere breakbeat cuts like Spectrazoids and Cubed - no surprise then that Airwave is present here on co-production duties.

There was occasionally a sense on his album that J00F was straining a little too hard to adapt his sound to a home-listening context, resulting in some ill-advised vocal tracks that brought to mind the inevitable "grown-up" moments on dance LPs circa 2001. Here he returns squarely to his native environment of the dancefloor, and yet both of these tunes are hemmed with gorgeous atmospherics and deft production touches that make them just as absorbing to hear at home as under the strobes at your local superclub. This is one of John's finest releases to date and compelling evidence that you can aim squarely for the dancefloor and still hit headphone gold.

Review: Solar Fields - Until We Meet The Sky

Also Known As: "Solar Fields goes a bit shoegaze". I suppose it had to happen eventually - the poster boy of Ultimae Records has explored just about every direction of psychedelic ambient in a highly prolific career over the last decade, even taking time out to make a brilliant trance album with 2007's Earth Shine. Sadly, Until We Meet The Sky just sounds a little conventional to me, perhaps because I've had to plough through an awful lot of this stuff recently. Even the name - Until We Meet The Sky - sounds quite generic in a shoegazey, post-rocky ambient way. The collective, inclusive plural, the obligatory mention of sky/landscapes and the present tense all combine to evoke those standard shoegaze values of vastness, humanity and vague hopefulness. To pick another such album from one of my Spotify playlists, compare it with Iambic's last album Under These Stars We'll Sleep Again. See what I mean?

Now, you didn't come here to read a very flimsy stylistic analysis of album titles, but what I'm trying to point out is that this feels like a pretty unimaginative album from Solar Fields. Like I said - he's done just about everything else so far, but hopefully this is just an experiment because I would prefer more development of his grand, spacious, "panoramic" sound rather than a lot of tracks consisting of maudlin piano noodlings and crackly timbres.

With that said, this guy is still a master and even if the building blocks of this album are over-familiar, he pieces together a pretty damn good structure, working up from a low-key opening up to some real journey tracks such as Last Step In Vacuum and a suitably grand finale in the self-explanatory Epilogue. This is definitely a cut above the host of similar albums I've heard like this recently, but at the same time it feels lazy and forgiving simply to slap another 8/10 onto it. I don't actually think this is as good as the other Ultimae albums from this year, and coming from Solar Fields it's disappointing, which inevitably leads to slightly unfair estimations. Structuralism, and all that. Also, he does suffer a little bit from Ulrich Schnauss syndrome here, whereby the music comes a little too overblown and melodramatic in places. That has always been lurking in the background of Solar Fields' music, but usually it's constrained and the grandness is more sonic and spatial, whereas there are a couple of moments here where he cuts loose emotionally.

So yeah... if you really love Ulrich Schnauss, Lowercase Noises and all that lot and can't get enough of that sound, this is the album for you. Also, if you're just getting into that sound, the clichés won't bother you because you're still in the honeymoon phase where everything is fresh and new and exciting. It ain't exactly my thing, though, good as it is.

Genre: Shoegaze/ambient
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10