A round of current dubstep LPs/mixes I compiled for Metro. Published in last Friday's paper, nationally.
Soul Jazz Records has championed dubstep since 2006, and Box Of Dub is its first compilation celebrating the British-born sound that draws heavily on electronic dub pioneers such as King Tubby, yet is equally shaped by rave, jungle, drum’n’bass, UK garage, hip hop and techno. Box Of… represents the dubstep’s myriad shades including Digital Mystikz’s eerily sparse yet warm, rootsy soundscapes, Skream’s swinging, bouncing avalanches of sub bass suffused with pure rave energy via Kode 9 seemingly harnessing the energy and toughness of a modern metropolis and Burial’s razor-sharp, piano and vocal-led, chilling twostep. Also featuring American producers Haze & Ho’s dissonant, militancy, Box Of Dub is not only a snapshot of dubstep in 2007, but also captures its weird and wonderful possibilities.
Dubstep’s sometimes derided as ‘sleepy’ because of its tempo (it sounds slow next to 99.9% of dance music) and big, lumbering basslines. That’s half the beauty of it, but it’s not an accusation that could be ever be levelled at Rinse FM DJ, N-Type’s Dubstep All Stars Volume 5 (Tempa), mix that features 38 tracks in 73minutes. It doesn’t take a genius to do the maths: you get approximately two minutes of each record before N-Type slams in the next. Dubstep’s biggest names are here, and N Type generally batters the dancefloor with dark dubstep, occasionally leavening the intense dancefloor pressure with a moment of lightness (such as Fat Freddy’s Drop or birds chirruping). It’s a dizzying, noisy experience, where production details are lost in the cacophony, but the fact it’s fast, furious, and ravey makes it perfect for the attention-deficit iPOD generation.
Plastician’s debut LP, Beg To Differ, is a dynamic, bristling affair that successfully navigates a path between dubstep and grime. Intensive Snare, with Skepta’s bullish hype-the-rave MCing, celebrates the stinging snare drum that’s a foundation of dubstep. Real Things with five rowdy MCs, is a sharp reminder of how annoying gobby MCs spouting inane lyrics can be (You’re a badboy MC? Why do we care?). Nevertheless Beg To Differ is a triumph, with crunky dark garage (Vio-lent), rotating, metronomic rhythms evoking the coming of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (Shallow Groove), and particularly the discomfiting dislocated sub bass of I Can’t Believe, that feels as if it’s outside tapping on your windows.
Cyrus’s LP From The Shadows (Tectonic) is an album to immerse your self in (like Burial and Kode9). It’s visual music, with a storytelling quality thanks to its innate depth, time and space that coaxes and allows your imagination to run wild: for example, the lumbering Mind Games is the sound of the zombies on the march. It’s also emotive, variously triggering feelings of claustrophobia, suspense, loneliness, melancholy, dread, and calm. So it’s no surprise that dubstep’s already made the jump to film scores, and featured prominently on the soundtrack to Oscar-nominated sci-fi thriller Children Of Men. From The Shadows is such an unsettling, tense experience, that Cyrus seems like the dubstep equivalent of Alfred Hitchock
