Pearson Sound – ‘Glass Eye’

William Skar: On first few listens the Pearson Sound LP is still holding its charms very close to its chest, with this brittle track the only thing to earn repeat spins as yet. There’s no denying this bit of lithe grot is quality product – although whether it’d sneak into a Top 30 Best David Kennedy tracks listicle is another question entirely. (7)

Son Raw: I’m always weary when producers preface a song by explaining their workflow – that’s usually a sign that they had more fun making it than we will listening to it. Luckily, this is the rare exception: I have no idea which equipment David Kennedy used to bounce these sounds, but he managed to turn what should be a pretty simple beat into a funhouse hall of mirrors. (7)

Scott Wilson: Rating Pearson Sound’s music can be a difficult thing, because the tracks of his that work in the club are often a much less exciting experience to listen to at home. What’s most striking about ‘Glass Eye’ is how austere it sounds compared to his previous material; there are definite shades of Kassem Mosse in that bassline. This isn’t a ‘Work Them’ or an ‘Untitled’ – there are no hooks to be found here, which is to its detriment – but I have a suspicion it might just come to life in the right setting. (6)

Brad Stabler: David Kennedy likes his curveballs. Ever since the one-two roundhouse kick of ‘Starburst’ and ‘REM’, the guy’s been throwing out the rulebook from the EP before and deep-sixing most (if not all) of his samples and drums and starting over with only what he feels like to go on at the moment. Miraculously, this always manages to work out in his favor, even if it’s sometimes more interesting to follow than break your repeat button to. I’m not chomping at the bit to give this one a bear hug though – it’s simply not as intriguing as the perfect basement vibes Mumdance and Logos are doing, or as impressive a toxic clusterfuck like Untold’s album. Guess it’s up to the rest of the LP to elevate it. Call my score cautious optimism. (7)

Claire Lobenfeld: Whatever Brad said. (6)

Mikey IQ Jones: This is beautifully hypnotic, and I dig the slow build, but I really wish Kennedy would let this go on for just a bit longer, as it spends three minutes dancing around in circles before the track really finds itself and then just… exits. Compared with his last few singles and EPs this feels more like a step backward: ‘Raindrops’ and his REM EP explored a hell of a lot more territory both rhythmic and ambient using equally minimal means. I’m still looking forward to this album, let’s just hope that the real killers haven’t been heard yet. (6)

Tayyab Amin: It’s half two and you’re starting to think about how long you can go on for. The DJ’s clearly enjoying theirself and you can see the floor splinter into the committed and those who share your conundrum: decide to soldier on until the very end or leave now, before effort eclipses enjoyment? You’ve got work on Monday, is losing a Sunday worth it? Stepping outside, what’s left of the rain sprinkles puddles and pavements, tickling the thuds that permeate through dampened brick. You lose track of where those muffled kicks end and where your footsteps begin. It’s uneasy out there, and you can’t resist one more look back into the deep end. [Press F5 to head back inside or → to call it a night.] (6)

6.5

Seven Davis Jr – ‘Wild Hearts’

Claire Lobenfeld: Can I get a radio cut of this? I was toe-tappin’ and jamming for the first few minutes, but it went on for way too long without getting more interesting. I appreciate Seven Davis Jr.’s esoteric funk moves, but I got a little bored after a while. Excited to see what the LP holds though. (6)

Son Raw: There’s a great funk tune fighting for its life somewhere in between that drum machine and the lo-fi fuzz, and it briefly makes a run for it during the break down, but by then it’s too little too late. (4)

Mikey IQ Jones: YES. My hopes and expectations were somewhat unreasonably high for this, but let’s be honest – after a rock-solid double whammy of 2014’s ‘Friends’ and the P.A.R.T.Y. EP, they’d have to be. That beat is punishing in the best possible way; just THINKING about how hard I’d be dancing if this came on in a club makes me sweaty in unfortunate places. My one beef is that I really want that last minute of soul ambiance pushed up and integrated elsewhere in the track, but that’s just me. (8)

Tayyab Amin: This is definitely the most fun non-rap, non-Bollywood tune I’ve heard this week. Still, like filmi music, this fits into a narrative and there’s positivity in that. So buoyant and full of life, and those piano keys sound like they’ve lived a couple of lives already. Leaves me with stars over my eyes and birds around my crown. (8)

William Skar: There’ll be Moodymann comparisons, but where KDJ hunkers down deep, this is crisp and spiky, carried by taser-to-the-temple vocals and super-crunchy percussion. The actual song at the heart of this is pretty lumpen and trad, but high marks for ornament. I like the coda best, funkless duffer that I am. (6)

Scott Wilson: Creating something that functions both as a killer underground club track and a legitimate pop song is pretty difficult to achieve, but Seven Davis Jr makes it sound effortless. There’s certainly nothing new about the sentiment of love being cruel, but he extols it in a way that makes you want to dance your problems away. Extra points for the breakdown that sounds like it’s coming from the inside of a tropical fish tank. (8)

Brad Stabler: Like taking your Salsoul and Scorpion collections and dropping them out of a balloon. ‘Wild Hearts’ isn’t exactly a wealth of new territory for Davis, but at this point you’re either on board for the long haul or you’ve long since cancelled your trip. His best move is muzzling that lush wash that breaks the song wide open at the four minute mark and letting it tease its way through up until that moment. Guy hasn’t lost his mastery of the payoff yet. (7)

6.7

Hysterics – ‘Club Life’

Scott Wilson: This material might be aimed more at the functional end of the spectrum than his Girl Unit tracks, but there’s just as much fun to had listening to it – it’s the perfect mid-point between Shed’s brand of breakbeat techno and 8-bar grime. (7)

Tayyab Amin: Disorientating in that life-comes-at-you-fast sorta way, feeling each stomp on the floor, each fist pump, channeling it into pure kinetic energy. Had me thrashing at the desk like I was Vatican Shadow. (8)

Claire Lobenfeld: For the sake of full disclosure, my Night Slugs evangelism is impenetrable. I will jam this forever, but it’s a little bit too subdued for my tastes. I do like that Girl Unit is going a little dark with Hysterics though – while minimalism isn’t usually my thing, I can see where and how this would get wavy for me. (6)

William Skar: An old fashioned term for hysterics is ‘the vapours’, and this just about sums this up – a barrage of pneumatic hiss, a barbershop of busted air-con units and punctured nitrous canisters. It’s properly dancefloor-ready in the mould of the Club Constructions series, but there’s a quiet quality to this that’s reminiscent of austere Hessle Audio types like Bandshell and Bruce. Firm like. (7)

Mikey IQ Jones: Hysterics’ Club Constructions 12″ sounded to me like a fashionable and lacklustre dip into EBM/cold wave territory when it was released, and this doesn’t fare much better with my ears – a flaccid caricature of industrial techno, but made for folks who can’t bear the dissonance or aggression. (4)

Son Raw: Give it up for Girl Unit: instead of whining that the tank top brigade basically dumbed down ‘Wut”s entire vibe to create “festival trap” (ugh), he just keeps it moving. He’s basically stripped the hip-jop and melody from his sound and replaced it with saturated drum workouts, but his attention to detail and immediacy ensure that this is just as fun as his previous work. This fits in nicely with the re-evaluation of bleep techno that guys like Mumdance and Logos are exploring, and while I’m not sold on anything that can be labeled a revival, there’s a lot of good ideas going around in this space. (8)

Brad Stabler: Hysterics has more of a fully formed and laser sharp aesthetic, tailor made for after hours or peak set freak outs, than anything that he’s released as Girl Unit since 2010. I’m not sure how much play this’ll get outside of warehouse and Night Slugs devotees, but more of this, please. (8)

6.8

Alexandria – ‘Treat Me Bad’

Scott Wilson: There’s not much I can say except this has just blown me away in every way possible. The Aaliyah comparisons are well founded and the production hits all the right buttons. I need to hear more of this immediately. (9)

Son Raw: The booming 808, that weird glitchy disintegration midway through, the woozy synth – if you’re aiming for the weirder side of R&B, you could do far worse. The songwriting’s not there yet and I probably won’t remember it tomorrow, but it wins on vibe alone. You can feel the humidity. (6)

Brad Stabler: The Aaliyah comparisons need to stop. Can’t a girl just stand out on her own merits? Make no mistake, between this and last year’s Rebirth, we’re watching something pretty fucking awesome unfold. Alexandria doesn’t go along with Ethereal’s beats so much as she works against them, her kiss-offs and luring invites swatting against the producer’s stabbing production. And it works: it gives all of ‘Treat Me Bad’ a push-pull dynamic, forcing you to lean in closer and pay attention to what she’s saying and what the beat’s doing. Alexandria is going to kill 2015 if she keeps this up. (9)

William Skar: Compared to the rarified and stuffy architecture of, say, an FKA Twigs track, this is enjoyably slippery, although Alexandria doesn’t get much of a chance to add her stamp to a strong instrumental. Obvious Aaliyah nods aside, Alexandria seems to be taking a lot of her cues from Erykah c. New Amerykah Part I – the highest of high praise. Still, it’s a hook short of a Harry Tate. (7)

Tayyab Amin: It’s the beat that brings me back to this one, but so many props to Alexandria for doing so much on this track even if I don’t fully vibe in step with it. She sounds perfectly comfortable over it and there are plenty of great moments. She can clearly do everything well but I can’t figure out what it is she does that’s just her. I can’t make out her character – I want to love it but it’s holding me at arm’s length. (6)

Mikey IQ Jones: Laugh at me all you want, but I still maintain that Girls On Top’s ‘Romance V.3’ – an interpolative bootleg blend of Aaliyah’s ‘Rock The Boat’ vocals with manipulated elements from OMD deep cut ‘The Romance Of The Telescope’ – is one of the most brilliant and important R&B productions of the modern era.

It pointed toward a direction that’s somehow remained unexplored in contempo soul music, where deep emotive vocals cocooned within beds of analogue electronics take the ideas of sensuality in the modern information age to all-too-relevant zones. It took the frigid longing of vintage sci-fi retrofuturism – an aesthetic that we still regularly mine for inspiration – and fused it with one of the most forward-looking modern soul voices of the new millennium. Alexandria’s Rebirth was one of the first albums to successfully take those spliced aesthetic concepts and expand upon them with startling results and (more importantly) memorable songs. ‘Treat Me Bad’ takes the velvet electricity of ‘Rebirth’ and toughens it up just enough not to feel like a leftover or outtake, while still retaining all of the magic the album captured. Why are these records not getting physical releases and all of the attention that they deserve?!? Fucking killer. Give her all of your love. (9)

Claire Lobenfeld: First and foremost, can we please put a moratorium on “weirdo rap,” “Atlanta eccentrics” and “alt-R&B” in 2015? I am guilty of this! Very guilty! But let’s all be done with it this year. We didn’t call Jodeci alt-R&B and during New Jack Swing, their heavy rap-influence was unlike anything on the radio at the time. DeVante Swing, through their work and his work with Swing Mob and mentoring Static Major, Timbaland and Missy Elliott helped to push an edge in R&B that gave us the robust landscape that allows us to have artists like FKA twigs and Kelela. I’m excited that Ethereal has sort of grabbed the torch to produce the next wave. His work with Alexandria and Awful affiliate Abra show an expansive palette of what can be done with neo-soul grooves in the Soundcloud age. More of this please! (9)

7.8

Ciara – ‘I Bet’

Brad Stabler: If Ciara’s next record is her Here, My Dear I would not complain at all. (8)

Mikey IQ Jones: This is likely to be a heavy-rotation breakup jam for loads of brokenhearted folk, and while the lyrics are spot-on, that corny fucking coffee shop acoustic guitar figure seems like it was put into the mix solely to get licensing deals from prime-time TV dramas. Honorable mention goes to Theron Thomas as Future’s stuntman in the background vocals, and while I applaud Ciara for throwing a ballad out there rather than spitting bile, this one’s just a little too drowsy for me. I keep wanting to like itmore than I actually do; the hook is undeniable though, so I’m just gonna hold out for the remix. (6)

William Skar: On first listen, this felt slight as a Rizla, with production so dated that Mick Aston might have dug it up. But Ciara’s delivery is so sensitive, so grounded in the real push-and-shove of a fag-end relationship, that I’m fully on board. (7)

Tayyab Amin: I don’t know whether it’s greed or this song that’s coercing me into comfort-eating these exceedingly good Mr. Kipling treats, and it could be either which says a lot about the track. Ciara’s so far past and well above being sour that she’s come round to sweet in this lesson for her ex. It doesn’t matter if I find the beat mad corny – it has “new me” written all over it – or if I don’t resonate with the melodies; here’s some straight-faced self-expression and I couldn’t doubt her for a second. And obviously those ad-lib digs at Future are equally hilarious and inspiring. (10)

Claire Lobenfeld: I know it wasn’t on purpose, but Amber Rose’s cavalcade of booty Instagrams this weekend landing days after Ciara released ‘Bet’ is the greatest, long game one-two punch response to ‘Pussy Overrated’, the most misguided rap song of 2014. The thing that excites me most about this song is that it comes with the news that Ciara will be working with Polow Da Don again and they make magic together. While this could be a little bit tougher, considering the lyrical content, I love a good post-breakup empowerment song and feel this one pretty deep in my bones. Shout out to my cat, who is also named Ciara. (8)

Scott Wilson: The fact Ciara can sing lines like “You acting like you upgraded me / I upgraded you” after with such nonchalance after going through such a breakup just reiterates how much of a star she is. Even without the biographical context, this is a killer song. (8)

Son Raw: I’m not the type to go for a backing a track with paint by numbers digi-guitar, but those adlibs are absolutely deadly and anyone who wrote a song like ‘Trophy’ deserves to be put on full blast. I’ll take a strong woman over a sad robot any day: you go Ciara. (7)

7.7

Purity Ring – ‘Begin Again’

Tayyab Amin: It’s like handing your little cousin the controller for the first time and watching them flounder their way through Street Fighter by learning to button-mash, and the only moves they can do are reverb and hi-hats. It’s kinda sweet and they handle themselves annoyingly well but you still end up sneaking onto arcade mode to play the computer, disconnecting their controller without them noticing. (5)

Brad Stabler: It loads when I press play. (1)

Claire Lobenfeld: My friends used to be in a band called The Vibration (their EP Ear to the Ground was actually re-released in the UK via Sink and Stove Records back in the early aughts) and they had a banger of a song on there called ‘Begin Again.’ Despite the fact that they never achieved the level of success as Purity Ring, that song title belongs to them forever. FOREVER! That said, Purity Ring hasn’t done anything that has excited me since ‘Lofticries’ and I think that was their peak. This is nice, but I would really like them to blow my mind. (5)

William Skar: At least ditchwater gives you typhoid. (3)

Mikey IQ Jones: For real, folks: why do we keep reviewing Purity Ring singles here?! This track is as milquetoast, drowsy, and uninspiring as they’re ever been, and I have nothing new to say about it, so I’m instead going to talk about another contemporary group who do this sound MUCH more successfully from Japan called The Beauty. They’ve only got one album and a fucking gorgeous 12″ out, but they both scratch the hazy, sun-bleached electroemotive dreampop itch in a considerably more satisfying way than what Purity Ring are doing. I know that these aren’t new, but you know what? Neither is what Purity Ring are doing, so fuck it. Purity Ring are a gateway band, and after one album of gateway schwag, you deserve the quality shit. If you dig these, check anything on the Cuz Me Pain label, too. Happy hunting. (2)

Son Raw: “You’ll be the moon, I’ll be the Earth?” The fuck outta here with your MDMA addled platitudes. If you find yourself throwing your hands up to this in a party, re-evaluate your life choices. (3)

Scott Wilson: Purity Ring are a nightmare vision of our musical future, a focus group-approved conflation of pop and underground music that’s equally insulting to both forms. The soundtrack to an ATP weekender attended exclusively by Bratz dolls. (1)

2.8

Final scores:

Alexandria – ‘Treat Me Bad’ (7.8)
Ciara – ‘I Bet’ (7.7)
Hysterics – ‘Club Life’ (6.8)
Seven Davis Jr – ‘Wild Hearts’ (6.7)
Pearson Sound – ‘Glass Eye’ (6.5)
Purity Ring – ‘Begin Again’ (2.8)