Williams: Love Crisis

Ah, novelty, wherefore art thou? William Threlfall has moved beyond the usual lackluster and well-traveled 4/4 margins with Love Crisis. Threlfall builds his sound with micro-sampling instead of culling full loops, a production style that thankfully tends toward polyrythmic complexity. Cowbells and big band instrumentation augment hi-hat hand claps while the beats ride on an undertow of strapping bass. Meanwhile, cut-up slippity-slappity soul is fed through the sonic sieve. Rolling melodics are interspersed throughout, creating (gasp!) novelty within the soul-house sound.

This review originally appeared in XLR8R on October 24, 2003.

Stewart Walker: Live Extracts

Stewart Walker’s departure from his usual isolation-induced compositions may be a function of his recent Discord collaboration with Geoff White. While Walker’s past releases have resounded with a divergence from others, Live Extracts finds him working within his older, tech-derived frameworks in new ways. Walker lets loose: the truly live sound of the album lends more to booty-whomp than a desire to pore over the meaning of the conceptual title. A tendency towards polyrhythmic overlays streams an amorphous eventfulness through each beat sequence. Walker now bears the mark of collaboration, while remaining just as sacrosanct in his creation.

This review originally appeared in XLR8R on July 4, 2003.

RJD2: The Horror

RJD2: friendly android cyber-bot or Definitive Jux sample-swapping producer? RJ’s deft mastering, despite his limited studio resources, place his skills among the caliber of the inhuman android, but the emotion evoked through his music is altogether human. Deadringer reworked dusty ’70s samples into a sort of Frankenstein of disparate parts that somehow remained sonically sweet. As a follow-up, the two-CD The Horror is all remixes of that debut. A new “Final Frontier” garners a more listenable rap than its Deadringer counterpart, and “Bus Stop Bitties” finds the Motown era’s soul food even bass-ier and tastier. The second CD features live performance footage as well as an interactive photo gallery. The Horror is superlatively inhuman in its quality, much like RJD2’s production skills.

This review originally appeared in XLR8R on May 30, 2004.