A frequently fantastic, weighty, clever and emotionally involving LP from the NYC duo.
Over the last 18 months or so, the absorption of outside influences into dubstep’s template has reached critical mass. Gradual assimilation of house, techno, 2-step and Chicago juke has collapsed boundaries, resulting in the array of 'bass music' forms currently hogging dancefloors. Machinedrum and Praveen Sharma's collaborative project Sepalcure has been one of the more interesting results. Their earlier EPs melded samples and textures more readily associated with 'classic' house music with dubstep's weight and mood. Their debut full-length continues the same trend, but ups the ante, putting a host of other elements into play. The most obvious throughout is juke/footwork, whose stammering rhythms and rapid-fire tempos also acted as the basis for Machinedrum's solo album Room(s), released earlier this year.
Sepalcure, interestingly, suffers from the same problem as Room(s). Its blurred textures, shifting rhythms and darting voices are beguiling over the course of a few tracks, but when stretched out to album length result in a homogenous listen. Nothing here is bad – far from it, in fact. It's just that taken over a full hour's length, tracks have a slightly jarring tendency to blur into a single, drawn-out whole, making it too easy to allow the album to fade into the background. That’s not helped by the fact that the duo's overly melodic sound makes for rather polite music, stripped of the gritty edges that made early dubstep so involving.
Lees de rest van deze review op BBC CD recensies (Engels)
Bron: BBC Music