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Product details
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Track Listings
| 1. Heatwave |
| 2. Hold On |
| 3. Wildfire |
| 4. Sanctuary |
| 5. Trials Of The Past |
| 6. Pharaohs |
| 7. Something Goes Right |
| 8. Right Thing To Do |
| 9. Ready Set Loop |
| 10. Never Never |
| 11. Go Bang |
Product Description
Review
It’s a both timeless and timely album, for the mix of right-now production – a haughty brew of clean-but-intricate beats, squeaks and wobbles – with chart-ready choruses. On headphones, it’s fixated on the image of a desolate figure lugging their emotional haul through the dancefloor while the night goes on around them, free of fluff and full of power. Through the right PA, its mini-breakbeats fly across open space like strobe-lit ping-pong balls. Each trick is as impressive.
Sampha’s vocals are striking, frequently courting the edge of tears – especially on Hold On where he pleads, "You’re giving me the coldest stare / Like you don’t even know I’m here". And so it continues, with other such imagery, of "ghostly enemies" on Trials of the Past and breaking down the blockade of "Pharoah’s guards, Kings and Queens" on Pharoahs, featuring the blindingly impermeable vocals of Roses Gabor. On Right Thing to Do, Jessie Ware comes through even stronger than the twisted bass and thumping 808s, mournfully purring "Let me eat all these lies up / Let me hide, let me hide them". It’s simple heartbreak, unusually matched with such an upbeat arrangement.
But as the pace drops and the cycle restarts, sobriety creeps back in. This album is paced like a perfect DJ set – it reads the listener with incredible insight, combining the immediate and familiar with intense passages of warm-up, breaking to allow for moments of blank space and reflection. The mix of shiny vocals with tight, accelerated textures is steeped deep in a glorious combination of two-step, UK funky, dubstep, US RnB and Chicago house. Add that to the compendium of a killer pop sensibility, infectious bubbling rhythms, unbridled energy and astounding curation from the man in the mask, and what we have here is the promise of this decade’s Timbaland.
--Natalie Shaw
Find more music at the BBC This link will take you off Amazon in a new window
Product Description
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Customer Reviews
The answer is an unreserved yes. Much as Caribou did last year with Swim, SBTRKT manages to perfectly pitch his electronic offerings between the cerebral and the visceral. The tracks herein are far from cookie-cutter pap with identikit beats, yet they do not suffer from the smugness that dance music can all-too-easily adopt when it tries to get smart.
Instead, SBTRKT keeps his eyes on the dancefloor and his ears on the beat. The rhythms - whether they be built on dubby throbs or crisp snares - are all direct, purposeful and aimed at the part of the brain that sets toes to tapping and buttocks to jiggling. Clever it may be, but this is party music first and foremost.
As well as his knack for satisfying and catchy rhythms, SBTRKT's choice of collaborators has also served him well. Sampha contributes some very agreeable vocals to a number of the tracks - complementing the music without dominating it - whilst Little Dragon's sassy turn on `Wildfire' is a definite album highlight.
All in all, this is an assured release that should secure itself a place in many Album Of The Year round-ups come December. For those who like their electronica to exercise brain and booty in equal measure, it is a must-buy record.
Pharaohs is the only 'stand out' track but this soon lost its appeal, after a minute. Read more
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