- Ed Upton tends to make records in the way you might make a playlist. From his vast archive of finished tracks, he cherrypicks productions with similar styles and sounds, arranging them on the same tracklist regardless of what year he recorded them. The method makes sense for someone with such a workmanlike approach to writing music. But he'll never pair his electro tracks with boogie, or his synth pop songs with acid, which, for a guy with such a wide range of talents, seems unnecessarily limiting.
On Escape-MCP, Upton's third album as DMX Krew this year, those processes yield uneven results. These 13 tracks are all electro, invariably with a sleek melodic touch and a muscular, reliable backbeat. Upton favors vintage synth tones and drum machines over the kinds of alien FX and ice-cold soundscapes more adventurous electro producers explore, and the classicism doesn't always work. A track like "Master Control Processor" works well because it emphasizes the detuned bassline jostling under its mechanical beat and underplays the short melodic phrase that swoops in for a couple bars. "Prospect," "Disk Drive" and "Infinite Library," on the other hand, favor standard bass sequences and synth hooks over creative sound design. Even compared to the wonky, two-minute "Bubble Sort," those tracks feel like filler on an often engaging album.
What Escape-MCP lacks in variety it compensates for with a handful of Upton's best electro tunes. The title track, with its depth charge low-end and pummeling drum work, picks up where the grisly club fare of 2015's ZSAGI left off. One of the strangest selections, "Exclusion Zone" wraps its frantic machine-funk in noxious synth noise for five delirious minutes, while "Black Steps" dials the energy back for a swaggering, acidic groove. The rigid bounce of "Operators" may be steeped in '80s nostalgia, but it has a grace and simplicity that's hard to deny, which is key to DMX Krew's enduring appeal. Like "Minimum Complexity Pursuit" illustrates, all Upton needs is a few trusty pieces of hardware and a chosen genre to work his magic. He's at his best, though, when he ignores the rulebook.
Tracklist01. Master Control Processor
02. Time Refraction
03. Escape-MCP
04. Exclusion Zone
05. Prospect
06. Black Steps
07. Laser Glove
08. Infinite Library
09. Operators
10. Minimum Complexity Pursuit
11. Bubble Sort
12. Disk Drive
13. Short Circuit