Scuba - Triangulation

SCUBA - TRIANGULATION (Hotflush)

Whilst Paul Rose continues the pattern shown by his label from its inception, of straying moderately from ‘bass’ plus ‘two step’, Triangulation is by and large a dubstep album. Albeit one with touches of deep house and a perceptible Berlin dourness and Spartan feel, in keeping with the producer’s residence in that city.

But a dubstep album this is, so it must stand or fall on the integrity of its bass parts. And related to that is the question of its body-friendliness. Is the body propelled by this music from a seating position out on to the open dance floor, zombie fashion?

Well the answer unfortunately is not a big booming ‘yes’. It’s more of a ‘yes, but….’

Most likely your butt will be inclined to wiggle a little in a semi-involuntary way to these rhythms. But the effect probably won’t be dramatic. The problem is, you’ll have definitely heard the rhythms on these tracks somewhere else before in dubstep.

 Beyond the clichéd low, or subsonic drops, fills and two-semitone punctuation marks, there’s no edge, either coruscating or delightful, to maintain much more interest than that which can sort of automatically make you shake your tush, a bit.

For me, the bass fails.

In ‘Latch’ for instance, I found a fairly imaginative percussion pattern overlaid with, to be blunt, nondescript, and non-evocative washes together with simple interjections of haunting airy leads. And yes, the over-familiar, vaguely wibbling bass is there too. This could have passed as a fairly successful attempt at a moderate, mid-tempo opener. But, to me, it almost turns out to be a highlight on this LP.

Sadly, Triangulation seems to fall into a class of steppage starting to emerge which is very much like a type of drum and bass which started to surface in the early 2000s. That strain didn’t, to be fair, go quite as safe as the coffee table.  But it was getting there.

In the same way that clean ‘jazz’, smooth ‘funk’ and airy female vocal snatches began to creep into the releases of say, the Carlito & Addictions of the D’n’B world, as if there had never been anything as heedless or sinister as say Lemon D and Dom & Roland just a few years earlier;  in dubstep, the invigorating bluntness and even harshness of say, the Mystikz, Loefah and Hawerchuk, has given way, to this.

Perhaps the strongest track, of what I am afraid I have to say is a weak bunch, is like the above. ‘Three Sided Shape’ ought to get the head nodding, and no doubt, will automate limbs in a club setting. But in common with the other pieces here, you’ll also find yourself fighting off one-off effects, sampled interjections and other diversions, as you listen to the music in the track. All these things can of course be welcome. However the suspicion is created when the underlying song doesn’t seem to be that weighty in itself, that the production does indeed have something to hide.

The decider for me was the disappointment I felt after a couple of pretty heady and promising introductions. One of them was ‘Glance’, which opens with a foggy, noisy white pad which is genuinely evocative, and hints of some interesting emotion to come. But no. Unfortunately the promise isn’t fulfilled for me. There is no genuine development of the mood and to compound things, right on cue in comes the same exhausted, basic step-patterns which were [or should have been] discarded in the first summer when this music appeared.

The closer, ‘Lights Out’ has a similarly pregnant introduction, in which a distorted over-effected grunting - and impressive - lead pulsates into the distance. And then? See above.

In the end, for me, this one doesn’t quite live up to the coded language which you could read in the label’s name. There’s nothing hot to flush here, because there’s nothing ‘illicit’ (meaning risky, dangerous, exciting, etc.) to hide.

Ken Odeluga