Thursday
Jun162011
Andy Stott - Passed Me By
by 
Sam Stagg Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 08:33AM
Sam Stagg Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 08:33AM 
Modern Love
I’m not sure if it’s a good sign if an album gets you wondering if your headphones are working properly. Andy Stott’s brief Passed Me By doesn’t outstay its welcome at a shade over 33 ⅓ minutes, but when you emerge from its clutches, it feels like you (or your cans) have been put through the wringer.
Most interestingly, this unsettling effect isn’t caused by the usual suspects in the high frequencies, but with pure bass pressure. Sounds come somewhere from the dub techno / post-dubstep palette, but they are smeared into murky, queasy tunes that seem to rarely break 100 BPM. It’s a trip, seldom pleasant but never boring.
“New Ground”, the first track proper, is a case in point. Over six minutes a muddy kick drum thuds away while around it twists a patch of viscous pitched-down noise, the opprobrium broken only rarely by a Burial-esque vocal sample rising above the murk. “North To South” if anything is even darker. The bass weight increases, and a strange reversed filter disco loop struggles to escape before being dragged back, Dagon-like, into the ooze. Later on, “Execution” doesn’t even leave the bottom end save a diva repurposed as screams.
There are some more conventional tracks. “Intermittent” pulls the by-now vaguely familiar trick of a core screwed loop emerging into a processed soul sample, “Dark Details” is a granite slab of industrial 2-step clanking its chains at a comparatively sprightly pace, and the album-closing title track is a lighter affair, presumably to aid those suffering from decompression sickness.
Passed Me By clearly parallels the general tendency to slow down house and techno at the moment, but the only reference I kept returning to was resolutely non-musical. There’s a classic slo-mo shootout scene in underrated 1997 thriller Cop Land where Sylvester Stallone gets his one good ear blown out, rendering him almost entirely deaf except for tinnitus and gunshots. Passed Me By is like that, only with added sub-bass. And those subs lead to perhaps the one negative thing I can say about this astonishing LP: I can but imagine what it must sound like when your equipment is up to the job, as mine patently isn’t. Time to buy some new headphones?
Most interestingly, this unsettling effect isn’t caused by the usual suspects in the high frequencies, but with pure bass pressure. Sounds come somewhere from the dub techno / post-dubstep palette, but they are smeared into murky, queasy tunes that seem to rarely break 100 BPM. It’s a trip, seldom pleasant but never boring.
“New Ground”, the first track proper, is a case in point. Over six minutes a muddy kick drum thuds away while around it twists a patch of viscous pitched-down noise, the opprobrium broken only rarely by a Burial-esque vocal sample rising above the murk. “North To South” if anything is even darker. The bass weight increases, and a strange reversed filter disco loop struggles to escape before being dragged back, Dagon-like, into the ooze. Later on, “Execution” doesn’t even leave the bottom end save a diva repurposed as screams.
There are some more conventional tracks. “Intermittent” pulls the by-now vaguely familiar trick of a core screwed loop emerging into a processed soul sample, “Dark Details” is a granite slab of industrial 2-step clanking its chains at a comparatively sprightly pace, and the album-closing title track is a lighter affair, presumably to aid those suffering from decompression sickness.
Passed Me By clearly parallels the general tendency to slow down house and techno at the moment, but the only reference I kept returning to was resolutely non-musical. There’s a classic slo-mo shootout scene in underrated 1997 thriller Cop Land where Sylvester Stallone gets his one good ear blown out, rendering him almost entirely deaf except for tinnitus and gunshots. Passed Me By is like that, only with added sub-bass. And those subs lead to perhaps the one negative thing I can say about this astonishing LP: I can but imagine what it must sound like when your equipment is up to the job, as mine patently isn’t. Time to buy some new headphones?
Sam Stagg
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