At some point during the creative process of his last album, SBTRKT he decided that he wanted to leave behind the tribal mask behind which he had hidden for more than a decade. The British producer justifies this move as an attempt to gain some agency over his identity as an artist and to carve out a space for those South Asian musicians who, like him early in his career, feel there is no place for them on the music scene. industry.
With such statements surrounding the release of “THE RAT ROAD”, his first full length in seven years, one would expect to find a project that would either reconnect with the vitality and brilliance of his self-titled debut (which put him at the forefront of the UK electronic scene in the early 2010s), or set him apart from most drastically of the perennially transient, occasionally overloaded, and often incongruous albums she’s released since. Above all, it would be natural to anticipate an album that would present a more refined and robust vision, that would affirm the personality of SBTRKT definitively and totally. In the end, “THE RAT ROAD” it achieves the first more than the second, and fails to achieve the third convincingly.
After an initial listening to the twenty-two songs that make up the length, one can almost glimpse the elongated silhouette of the more than two thousand songs that SBTRKT He admits to writing during his hiatus and the four hundred he sent to his label: “THE RAT ROAD” it tends towards the tedious, mainly because the album’s rhythm is broken by derivative and too short interludes, which aren’t even given long enough to become something worth revisiting.
This is, however, an easy flaw to overlook, as neither the lack of conceptual precision nor the editorial dooms the project: “THE RAT ROAD” it’s pretty far from being a bad album. The guest list is long again, but this time they comfortably adapt to the palette of SBTRKT —old collaborators, like Sampha or Yukimi Nagano from Little Dragon, appear to confirm their synergies with the producer, and new friends and promises, like Toro y Moi and LEILAH, star in some of the best tracks on the album.
As an artist framed in post-dubstep, SBTRKT he’s always displayed a certain disregard for genre boundaries, and this instinct comes through here, albeit in moderation: his electronic eclecticism (“YOU, LOVE” soars amid ethereal strings until it explodes into a jungle break, “WAITING” concluding with a cacophony of sharp synths and modulated vocals that transpire on a light and playful keyboard, “YOU BROKE MY HEART BUT IMMA FIX IT” is all choppy samples and static glitch) is quite rooted in urban pop and contemporary R&B, as evidenced the most direct and immediate pleasures of songs like “NO INTENTION”, “LIMITLESS” or “DRIFT”.
What really unites “THE RAT ROAD” is not so much a sound as a feeling: a twilight tone permeates the entire album, an atmosphere of nocturnal SBTRKT I had already explored in previous projects. In the first verse of “DAYS GO BY”, Toro y Moi suggests going out “for a drive around midnight”, and that is exactly what the song evokes, with its distorted melodies, thumping subcutaneous bass and submerged percussion: something relaxed and tinted with neon, an early morning getaway, a car cruising through lonely streets. As on this track, the production on the rest of the length is subtle, though not exactly minimalist.
The most notable exception to this observation is “LFO”: the song diverges and moves between radically different sections, but never feels disorganized, just organically sprawling. “LFO” has much richer dimensions and textures than the rest of the tracks, and the chord progressions that occur beneath the surface give it a weight that makes the rest of the album revolve around it and is, without a doubt, the cusp of SBTRKT in “THE RAT ROAD”, and a glimpse of what might have been had he condensed his efforts into a more compact yet daring package.
THE RAT ROAD (ALBUM) de SBTRKT