Available on: Slime digital download

When newish London producer Kontigo sent me his tunes, he described them as “future garage”, and it was a little distressing to hear someone refer to their own music like that. When a scene starts to form around something that never existed, the potential for pointless recycling and uninspired drivel is dishearteningly high; would it mean that Kontigo’s beats would be eager to fit in with this imagined trend, or was he simply trying to put a zeitgeisty spin on his own music?

The truth doesn’t lie anywhere within those neatly defined binaries, and the result is something inherently conflicting. Kontigo’s debut EP – released on the unfortunately named Slime label – is full of big, grand overtures, tunes so blatantly obvious that they’re almost sickening. It’s clear that Kontigo has a formidable sense of melody: his tracks are eminently polished, melodies and textures you might expect coming out of Tiesto or someone similar rather than “future garage”. Therein lies another issue: the tracks here are heavy on midrange synths: basslines sparking out of burnt-out speakers and fuzzy synths padding vocals. ‘Believe’ and ‘Losing You’ are big and unabashed pop numbers, the former floating on glacial chords, and the latter shuddering as its incisive bassline cuts through at sharp angles. Both of them feature vocals that sound like they were taken wholesale from old soul tracks; ‘Losing You’ is almost like a gaudily decorated version of Pangaea’s ‘Memories’, built up with trancey melodies and big-room synths. But it shows a bit more skill with vocal manipulation than ‘Believe’, which sounds like an acapella taken wholesale and placed over one of Kontigo’s tracks.

As such, Kontigo sometimes relies too much on untouched vocals to lend his tunes a recognizable hook: without them, ‘Losing You’ or ‘Believe’ wouldn’t be near as effective. It’s a worry confirmed by the rest of the release; the vocal in ‘Here I Come’ is too fey, swallowed up by the sensory overload around it, and the instrumental ‘Stars Fall’ is simply boring, dull elements floating aimlessly around a rhythm section that never quite finds its ground. It’s corrected in a gorgeous remix by fellow “future garage” acolyte Submerse, who imbues it with a sparkling majesty in tune with the evocative title.

Kontigo has all the makings of an embryonic talent, but as it is right now these tracks feel like pleasant configurations of factory presets. He’s got a keen ear for melody but not the means to viably express it, or not yet, anyway. At the very least, tracks as infectious as these have a tendency to stay in people’s heads. Even if they sometimes feel like all empty calories and sugary sweets, who doesn’t like a bit of that every once in a while?

Andrew Ryce