(Global Underground/Shock)

While I’ve had this CD a long time, I’ve had knowledge of its arrival for even longer.  I recall a good friend conducting an interview with Phil K a year ago and hearing it brought up – the holy grail of Melburnian progressive, a full length artist album by two of Australia’s…  no, two of the world’s most chunky, funky, knob-twiddling, CDJ-fiddling, breakbeat-knowing, tweeter-blowing masters of dancefloor disaster, Phil K and Luke Chable.

And so, I’ve been listening to this CD for a month, trying to decide what to write for ITM that could possibly do it justice.  Because, like that girl or boy that you can’t get out of your head or life because no matter how much they annoy and disturb you you still love them to death, I have really struggled with what to make of this album.  As one friend joked, “perhaps it should come with a ‘warning: for advanced listeners only’ sticker on it.”  Advanced indeed.

I’ll go over each track, but I’m going to start in the middle. I simply cannot listen to track 5 (the title track to album) from start to finish.  Having given it repeated listens, it drives me absolutely bonkers.  Having (mis)spent my youth fiddling with just about every knob, slider and button on just about every significant noise-making device to have entered dance music’s vocabulary over the past thirty years, I must say the novelty of getting bizarre noise-for-the-sake-of-noise out of strange-smelling analog synths wore off for me long ago – and more importantly, in retrospect I’m not sure anyone other than those creating those noises ever really wanted to listen to them.

Sure, you can bang on an ARP2600 just to hear the spring reverb go gronk, you can fill every jack on an MS20’s front panel (the real ones, not the silly little USB ones floating around now) and feed the signal from a circuit-bent overclocked speak-and-spell into it, and timestretch the resulting output into fifteen minutes of madness, but should you?  It’s great fun to create, but it’s really not that pleasing to listen to for the average listener – and if you’d like to sell more than a couple hundred CDs, average listeners are important.  So it is with track 5.  If I heard this song played in a club, I would leave my drink on the table and run for my life.  If I was with someone who I cared about or someone I considered psychologically unstable, I would implore them to come with me for their own safety.  Hell is a place where this song is Nokia’s default ringtone.

Track 6 is no better.  It’s called “Computer Crash”, and apparently it was exactly that – the noise made when Phil and Luke’s computer crashed during a production session.  It sounds about as good as you’d expect a 26 second song called “Computer Crash” to.  Who wants to hear this?  Have you ever seen a track on an album called “Whoops I Ran the Master Outs to An Input and Cranked the Gain?” or “Get the Mic Away From the Speaker Before We Blow Another Tweeter?” or “Because We Spilled Beer in the Drum Machine (Again)”?  Mercifully it’s only 26 seconds, but it’s atonal arhythmic noise – made worse by the fact that its full-code, like the most drop-out filled DAT you’ve ever heard - arhythmic staccato bursts of loud noise.  I’d rather listen to a fork in a blender – at least it would be fun to watch.

Next up we have the ambient-y tracks - tracks 1, 3, 9, and 12.  To be honest, these aren’t particularly strong as ambient tracks, and if you’re an ambient listener who’s also a fan of Luke and Phil’s usual sounds – big basslines, complex percussion, and rich and intelligent arrangement -you’ll likely be a bit disappointed with these tracks, too.  Put any of these tracks up against album cuts from Autechre, Boards of Canada, FSOL, or the Orb, and consider the stunning productions that Phil and Luke have put together in the past, and, well, I guess I expected something a bit better, a bit more intelligently musical.  Track 1 in particular is irksome, because at 6:27 it sucks up nearly ten percent of the album’s total running length; if it tells any sort of story, the story is: kid buys fancy synth, kid turns on fancy synth and finds patch called “AmbientZuluWar”, plays on it for five long minutes, and is then promptly eaten by hammer-wielding pterodactyls.  The first time I played this album for a friend, I kept telling her “hold on, it gets better, I promise” while waiting for the ptero- err, waiting for the song to end.  Eventually the ‘next track’ button won out.

At this point you may be thinking “ok, so what, the album is crap, is that what you’re saying?” – and if this album were made up of tracks 1, 3, 5, 6, 9 and 12, then yes it would be about as enjoyable as chewing aluminium foil on a hot summer day.  But don’t leave just yet – we’ve not yet touched on the good bits.  And here’s the kicker: the good bits aren’t just good: they’re amazing.

Track 2 is called “Theme from a Fairytale”, and quite simply it’s stunning.  As in I’ve probably listened to it fifty times in the past week, stunning.  As the beats come in – in 12/8 time no less – and the melody begins, the dark and intelligent grooves that I’d hoped to hear from the first track finally make their appearance.  Complex rhythm, catchy understated melodies, the top-drawer Sasha-esque production values most producers barely dare to dream of (Damon Fanooni the top-drawer US-based progressive producer better known as Habersham, is credited with production for this track), all wrapped around an insistent groove.  It comes together to form a song that is deceptively simple in its complexity.  Right then, now we’re getting somewhere. Warm, gorgeous and chunky, it’s perfect down-time listening material and would fit right in on any one of those Lamb/Portishead/Morcheeba/Tricky-esque compilations for sale in finer hotel lobbies everywhere.  (It’s also the B-side to the aforementioned “Because we Can” as released on vinyl, and thus worth snapping up if you see it go by in your local record shop)

Track 4, “Naughty”, takes a good three minutes to get going – and when it does, we’re back in 12/8 time again (onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve, say it with me kids!) which means we’re still off the dancefloor, but now we’ve bumped the pace up a bit and brought some guitars in, too. 

Track 7 – Little Peaking.  Have I used the word stunning too many times already?  Here we find Lostep stepping firmly onto the dancefloor.  Think Chris Lake getting really angry at Groove Armada for letting Hyper overstay his welcome in Mouseville, and you’re close – but I daresay Phil and Luke know their beats better than all that other lot combined.  Here we have all the elements these two dance floor geniuses are known for wrapped up into a track that, at 8:30, seems to go by in about two minutes flat.  To my ears and feet, it’s worth buying the entire album twice over just to get one’s grubby mitts on this gritty electro-breaks bomb.  A dance floor weapon of the highest order.

Track 8 – “Dr. King’s Surgery”.  Another definite winner.  Dark, driving and dirty tribal beats, with a four-on-the-floor beat to the long-ish breakdown, and a chunky breaks exit.  Superlative production with heaps going on, this one’s fun at home and playable in a DJ set, too.

Track 10 – “Burma”.  A timeless classic, this track’s been around for two years and will likely be around another twenty.  Gorgeous etheral progressive breaks at its absolute finest and a must have for any progressive DJ. If you don’t know the track by name you’ll know it to hear it, and as its presented here in its full-length unmixed glory, if you don’t have it on wax this is the next best place to pick it up. 
Track 11 – “Villain”.  If Burma is the timeless classic, Villain may well be its progeny and next of kin.  Once more deep, dark and driving, with guitar-esque melodies over a huge bassline and tight percussive breaks.

And so you have it.  Because We Can.  One one hand, I hate it, because as a start-to-finish album it drives me bonkers.  There are five tracks on here that are, at least to my ears, completely useless superfluous filler that neither bridge the gaps between the songs they’ve been placed between, nor offer any real insight or depth into the sort of work I’d expect these two to be capable of in terms of downtempo and ambient productions. 

But on the other hand, I love it because it has at least as many gems on it.  If you’re used to paying $20 per track for 12” vinyl singles, or even if you’re used to paying $3 each for digital downloads, this album contains at least four “must have” bombs on it; if the CD contained nothing but  “Theme from a Fairytale”, “Little Peaking”, “Burma” and “Villain” on it, it would be “that killer Lostep EP” and there’d be brawls in the street outside record shops over the last copy.  I just wish the boys had brought as much energy and emotion to bear with the ambient elements of this album as they have managed to do with these beat-driven elements.

So it is a fantastic album that you’ll want to play to friends and family from start to finish as an introduction to dance music?  No – but I suspect that was never the intention for this album anyways.  Should you have it in your collection if you’re a discerning listener, and think about dropping some of its standout tracks into your sets if you’re a DJ?  Absolutely. 

They could, they did, I love it, I hate it, it’s Lostep, buy it, the end.