This album set up its base camp in some of the ugliest territory in modern music, pitching a tent right between dupstep mountain and a river of sludgy, clumsy tuneless instrumental hiphop plumbed by the likes of Onehtrix and Samiyam. This is a piece of land that can't be wiped off the map fast enough, a stripped wasteland, a feral breeding ground for amateurs eager to use tweaks on others' new tricks as a substitute for creativity.
From these blighted beginnings, to his credit, Flume tries to forge a new path: adding guest vocals, flashes of beauty, and a slinky sensuality to rise from the ashes. And for the most part, it succeeds, finding fresh flesh under the dubstep apple's rotten skin, shaking off the languid tendrils of overslow beats, creating atmosphere with pockets of fresh air. On Top in particular inspires confidence that there's diamonds still down there somewhere.
On the other hand, you can take the music out of the dubstep, but you can't take the dubstep out of the music. There's some fancy new clothes on this album, but they hang from a skeleton of newness for its own sake, and when well-worn tricks poke out from behind the seams the illusion is broken.
I long for a return to tunefulness and craft and melody. Electronic music keeps digging deeper and deeper into the same ground, with legions of 12'ers swarming to any newly discovered pocket of sound and scrabbling over eachothers' corpses to extract a paycheck. Time to move on. Stop digging. Find a new land. Please, move along, doing things wrong for its own sake is done. Bending notes over backwards just to hear them groan is done. Keep it moving. Nothing to hear here 3/5
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