Hmmmm, not sure how worthwhile it is to get dragged into this debate again, but it is interesting...
I guess I can agree with the the general claim that the rate of innovation in Joker's releases has gradually slowed down over the course of his career. I hope I wasn't one of the people MMS is accusing of 'shouting him down' the last time we had this discussion; all I aimed to do was disagree with the point he was making (god forbid....).
More specifically, I was disagreeing with the claim that he and a few others were making that all of Joker's most interesting work was done and dusted by the end of 2008. As people have been saying here, at the very least Purple City/Re-Up is both a brilliant release in itself and far from identical to what Joker had put out prior to it, and that was released in mid 2009 iirc. But I guess that's also evidence for the claim being made that his most interesting output in 2009/10 has been in form of collaborations, with Ginz, TC, Terror Danjah, Jakes etc.
But I accept my view on this is prob coloured in that I just happen to like the basic 'Joker by numbers' sound - it's distinctive and enjoyable, addictive even from my pov. It's like, I can see that Stash and Tron, for example, might not be the most innovative things he's done, but they're still great fun to listen to. I can take the point, too, that he's gradually moved towards using more 'crowd-pleasing' sounds and structures, but again I find his more crowd-orientated material to be much, much better than the average standard wobble tune that I hear. In a way I think it's healthy that someone in the dubstep/post-dubstep scene is prepared to stick in there and produce dancefloor tracks of a good quality, even if it means that we as fans potentially miss out on some home-listening material (though obv I can't pre-judge his album, if he is working with vocalists then that's potentially a big look, imo).
