Words by Max Feldman
Sorry guys, but the game is up. Dubstep is dead. It was quite fun while it lasted, getting caned on horse tranquilisers and allowing deep bass to mess with our conception of time. For a while, this kept the crowd hyped and, at home, those basslines exerted enough Hertz to cause the deaths of pets exposed to them. However, at some point around 2008, in between some excellent Soul Jazz compilations, and the aftermath of Benga and Coki’s ‘Night’, a ‘Doom’s Night’ for youths in hoods, the movement melted. Ministry of Sound started putting out dubstep compilations and, as when jungle became drum & bass, and that became “d&b”, dubstep has become saturated, sanitised and scare free. Instead of being the sound of the streets, it became the sound of suburban discotheques.
Fortunately for the avid listener, as opposed to the consumer, and for those who like to use prefixes like pre-, post-, and proto- to vindicate their taste, we have a new bunch of gurus. Artists on Hessle Audio, Hemlock, and Hotflush records, to which Mount Kimbie belong, are breaking moulds and producing some mutated, gob-stopping, tech-flecked dub. While their contemporaries flirt with free jazz and uneven synth clobber, or rigorous and thumping techno, Mount Kimbie’s approach is more delicate and ambient.
Crooks & Lovers follows two excellent EPs, ‘Maybes’ and ‘Sketch On Glass’. Where the former was ambient and clunky, the latter was bleepy and funkier. The former was graceful and suitable for both late nights and early mornings. It was easily permeated by birdsong, or engine noise, while the latter was a little more deranged.
Long players within the wide confines of electronic music often run into difficulty when they sacrifice club bangers for crafted songs, or when they mistake the conjuring of atmosphere with being ponderous. At 35 minutes long, Crooks & Lovers doesn’t make the latter mistake, but it’s hardly perfect. It’s not long enough to truly hypnotise and, as a result, many of its tracks feel like sketches. It doesn’t conform to club standards, but neither does it fit in with electronica LP decorum. Instead, it is asymmetrically structured. ‘Carbonated’ and ‘Ruby’ shoot off at awkward angles, seemingly flowing towards euphoria, before being bundled into a more mysterious back seat. On the former, synths build slowly, ominously, before blurring into babbling electric organ. The latter lies, glimmering, beneath murky bathwater. Where contemporary dubstep has increasingly more pop sensibilities, and is thus increasingly more likely to hit you with clean right hooks, Crooks & Lovers unapologetically comes out of leftfield without being an acne-scarred IDM cliché.
Crooks & Lovers criss-crosses between organic and processed, between hinting at its ability to bang and being studied and subtle. On ‘Tunnelvision’ and ‘Adriatic’, sparse synths are splayed with plucked acoustic guitars. Where ‘Before I Move Off’ stutters, its beat clipped, its vocal snippets short, it’s difficult to know whether ‘Blind Night Errand’ is destined to cause post-dancefloor dementia or whether it documents it. Perhaps that’s the point. Here, filtered squelches move in waves, broken up by a flickering beep that evokes an ill-remembered supermarket checkout. It’s gelled by a dustily shimmying 2-step beat, the Mount Kimbie motif, that allow cryptic synths to wobble above them.
Crooks & Lovers, at its most sonorous, indicates solemnity. Its tone, its hints of crystal melancholy, have a more elegant resonance than the mutated spasming of the music of Joy Orbison, Untold, or James Blake. Those artists produce excellent records, sure, but Mount Kimbie look to signal songcraft by using vocal samples rather than using them as garage or r&b signifiers. These vocal slots punctuate a few of these tracks, rain-soaked and blurred, inevitably speaking of unrequited romance rather than acting as demolition divas. Crooks & Lovers is somber and, while the songs themselves need to last longer to have the emotional impact they point towards, it’s a focused album. Where its brevity can be seen as a bad thing, it doesn’t bludgeon, it beguiles, making a case for a greatness that is hopefully still to come rather than being top-heavy or precocious.
(Hotflush, 2010)
