(XL Recordings)
Jamie Roberts’ unsettling take on bass music is crammed with glitchy rhythms and jolting sounds. It’s as disorienting as it is immersive
SickElixir is not an album much interested in gently easing the listener into its darkly claustrophobic world. The first thing you hear is roughly approximate to the distressing sound of someone alternately gasping for breath and attempting to clear their passages of phlegm. It’s joined by a distorted bass drum overlaid with a metal-on-metal clank in lieu of a snare. There’s a weird noise somewhere between radio interference and the sound of fabric tearing, some incomprehensible, sonically warped and doom-laden guttural chanting, and harsh electronic tones that churn and screech. All this is in the opening minute of the first track: notice is served that Jamie Roberts’ latest album is probably not for everyone.
This will hardly come as a shock to anyone with prior knowledge of his oeuvre. From the moment he started releasing music as Blawan – beginning in 2010 with Fram, a twitchy, unsettling take on UK bass released by revered label Hessle Audio – Roberts has cut an impressively unbiddable figure. His style was marked by an industrial darkness that even seeped into his rework of Brandy’s lush R&B track I Wanna Be Down – something he has suggested may have to do with his spectacularly grim-sounding teenage job in a maggot farm, when his working days were soundtracked by the clanging of an industrial mincer. His biggest track to date is 2012’s Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage, a relentless techno cut featuring a dive-bombing bassline and a warped sample of the Fugees. It crossed over into more mainstream DJs’ sets, albeit occasionally remixed into more palatable shapes.