I’ve had this album sitting on my shelf for a few months and it was still unopened, starting to gather dust. I picked it up on the strong recommendation of a friend, but recently I had started losing enthusiasm towards some of the current Zod projects and made excuses for not having the time to check it out. Don’t get me wrong- Zod has some truly superb releases. My first Zod record, Destro’s ZOD.MIX.02 immediately floored me- and it still does years later with every listen. Exillon’s EP 1 gets quite a few rotations these days and I also liked a number of the earlier releases, but it seemed an emphasis was starting to be placed on DSP ingenuity rather than musical content. I’ll admit it is a matter of taste- without fail, one of the trademarks of a Zod release is stellar production, but at a certain point (with limited spending power and listening time) one has to make choices and I was starting to stray from the Milwaukee-based collective.
I wasn’t more than a few tracks into the 48-minute Bellicose Pacific before I realized that Mr. Wincek was going to make me feel like an absolute fool for sleeping on this album. It is a very mature and impeccably refined work- every track so well developed musically and crafted with precision. It’s hard to pin down a particular style or theme- the beats race through drum n bass, hiphop, gabber, jazz, video game, and breakcore influences effortlessly without ever losing the listener. However, one unifying element is Emotiona Joystick’s wonderful sense of melody and harmonic movement. Extending beyond the progressions of individual songs, the tracks set each other up so well that I rarely find myself skipping around the CD.
As a complete piece- it works well from beginning to end, but for the selectas- there is something for everyone. There certainly are no shortage of tracks that could rock the party- the hypnotically groove-tastic “Next Time” and “Hardcore #1,” “Disfunked,” with its distorted hip-hop breaks and tweaked out bass lines, and the brutally raw “Rotterdam” would ignite any dance floor… but there are plenty of choices for the headphone nodders as well. The epic “Muddy and Sloppy” juxtaposes atmospheric arpeggios against broken beats, peaking at what sounds like a momentary gabber hoe-down, but is brought full circle with the re-introduction of the original arpeggiations. “Patch32” took a little while to grow on me, until I realized I had been unknowingly humming the melody in my head for the past couple days. Rather infectious, really.
If I had heard this album back when it was originally released, it easily would have found itself next to Leafcutter John’s Housebound Spirit and Donna Summer’s This Needs To Be Your Style as one of my favorite of the year. Kind of embarrassing that it had just been sitting there all that time, but I guess it is better to show up late to the party than not at all… Highly recommended.
Bellicose Pacific is OUT NOW on Zod Records.
