Not feeling the new bits at all really. Thought the audio I heard last night was a hoax initially, so maybe that's coloured my perception of it.
But like, whatever about making tunes that are essays in the mimetic reconstruction of pirate radio, and that have a frailty and sweetness to them that's congruent with the primitivity and rawness of the hardcore, jungle and garage blaring out of passing cars tuned in to london pirate radio that were supposedly his original reference points, and whatever about that curious aesthetic / emotional nostalgia that he's always nailed, this is just pants.
"Rival Dealer" sound like that awful prog breaks crossover stuff from the very early 00's; would fit right into a Sasha / Zabiela / Hybrid / Way Out West / Deep Dish set from back then. In fact it reminds me of an old Alistair Whitehead / Dave Seaman mix cd I got free with Mixmag in like 97 or so, except recorded off a badly tuned radio. I do like the bits after about the 5:24 minute mark, the first half though, awful.
And one of the other tunes sounds like a Coldplay live dvd run through a load of guitar reverb pedals.
I mean, fine, if you take him as a musical historiographer then it's entirely consistent with what happened to mainstream superclubby 90's dance music in the end. But if you take him as someone whose early work was an almost Quixotic resistance to that trajectory of music becoming clean, polished, clubby and sacrificing vibes on teh altar of technique then what the hell is this?
Drawing the critical attention back to the swing of El-B's drums, to Steve Gurley's drums, at a time when garage was "the last secret in dance music" and while dubstep was creating a sonic context in which those drums would be able to reemerge was a heroic achievement. Being able to back that up with the conviction that jumps out of those early interviews with Blackdown is entirely another, and he'll have a very special place in my heart and in my record collection for those two things alone, but I really viscerally dislike that "Rival Dealers" thing on first listen.
Of all the genres that don't need critical reappraisal, trancy prog-house / nu-skool breaks isn't one of them. The clinicality of that sound just doesn't lend itself to Burialisation, nor indeed was the music itself ever (in my opinion) content-rich enough to lend itself to deconstruction in his style.
