(08.05.06) Another case of possible over-hype. At first, I was very skeptical reading raving reviews about Various Production’s first vinyl releases, but they just grew on me a few weeks before the release of this album. Mainly it’s wisely produced electronica, with more than an eye to the current underground streams (read: dubstep), sharp breaks, deep bass merged with delicious pop songs. Do not think about mash-up or bastard pop though, the overall result is quite unique, a sheer surprise for those who think that electronic music ran out of ideas twenty years ago. The eclectic mixture that is The World Is Gone is shown within five minutes and two tracks.
“Thunnk” is a brief exercise of distorted dark electronics, while “Circle Of Sorrow” is a purely instrumental folk song, with guitar, strings and female vocals (they don’t reveal who they belong to). These extremely different styles begin to hybridize from “Don’t Ask”, which is basically a dubstep piece very focused on the dub side but with the addition of distant words by the aforementioned mysterious singer. Then comes “Hater,” one of the biggest successes of the Various Production label, where the singer is on the forefront but the bass is still shaking underneath the surface; “Soho” is one tune to crank up the volume to, the alcoholic moaning of a male vocalist add some more gloom to the snappy rhythm and the buzzing bass. “Lost” and “Sir” are in the same vein of “Hater”, I rate “Sir” especially high for its sexy, seductive voice underlined by a bass that is out of this world, a trick even bettered in “Sweetness,” where the vocals almost belong to a blues song, but the bassline is vibrant electro and the atmosphere is poisoned by industrial echoes. At this point, the mellow instrumental “Deadman” is totally bewildering, but by now you should have understood that Various are everything but predictable. Obviously, immediately after this calm and relaxing track there’s “Today,” the most creepy moment of the entire record, there’s a heavy dubstep rhythm that morphs back and forth into a four-to-floor beat, topped by hip-hop scratches, doomsday noises and you’ll be amazed of how the singer doesn’t sound out of place. To aptly end such a varied work, there’s time for the voiceless, menacing title track and for a last melancholic ballad called “Fly”.
If all the tracks sounded like “Circle Of Sorrow,” I would have never touched this record, but it’s also likely that if it had been entirely based on tweaked electronica and dubstep mechanics, it would have never reached such widespread attention, nor XL and the ‘indie’ audience, but it would have been stuck to the clubbers. But this is not the case, otherwise the duo wouldn’t be called Various Production; so, forget the fact that XL is not as underground as you like, surrender to the hype and get The World Is Gone as soon as possible.
The World Is Gone is out now on XL. (Buy it at Amazon.com).
