- The years after dubstep offered some great debut albums. But the better that first one was, the truer the cliché about the difficult follow-up. Zomby has yet to match 2011's Dedication. When Darkstar finally followed up on 2010's North, they sounded like a completely different band. Jam City's Classical Curves spawned countless imitators in 2012, and with last year's Dream A Garden he more or less discarded its aesthetic.
Kuedo's Severant, whose trap-inflected drums and bittersweet Vangelis melodies inspired similar devotion, seems to have been even tougher to follow. Three years after its release, Jamie Teasdale admitted to having archived or deleted "several hundreds of tracks" for being "too complacent to expectations." On the other hand, a complete stylistic U-turn would risk alienating fans. In the end, he appears to have split the difference. Slow Knife both builds on his past and rejects it, with mixed results.
The album's first half opts for continuity. Teasdale distills Severant's sci-fi romanticism, paring back the drums and squeezing a new richness out of the arrangements. Most of these tracks are excellent—"Hourglass," "Slow Knife," "Bending Moon"—but the highlight is "In Your Sleep," featuring the butter-smooth voice of Wild Beasts' Hayden Thorpe. It's an unexpected but inspired pairing, giving Teasdale's towering music a sense of human scale. Perhaps, in another dimension, Slow Knife is a brilliant pop record.
But around the midpoint, it becomes something quite different. The album's second half follows on from last year's Assertion Of A Surrounding Presence, which echoed the doomy neoclassical of Roly Porter (who collaborated on the EP) and the oblique narratives of J.G. Biberkopf, a signing to Teasdale's Knives label. The familiar Kuedo materials are there, but orthodox rhythm and melody are downplayed in favour of tense dissonance and open-ended structures.
The best way to understand these tracks might be as orphaned film cues. (Since Severant, Teasdale has worked as a freelance sound designer and composer.) They're rich, convincing environments, but sparsely populated ones, as if they're leaving space for the visuals. The likes of "Approaching" and "Warmer Light" are slick but not entirely satisfying. "Halogen Light" is just a few daubs of sweet piano melody over a background of hissing crickets—lovely, but where's it going?
Other tracks explore dissonant string textures, pioneered by the likes of György Ligeti and long since Hollywood clichés. "Breaking The Surface" is the most dramatic, building to a panicked cacophony of sawing violins. In a horror film it would be just the ticket; on a home listening album it seems kind of redundant. Slow Knife's best moments might even trump Severant. But Teasdale's efforts to escape the shadow of his debut sometimes lead him astray.
Tracklist01. Hourglass
02. Under The Surface
03. In Your Sleep
04. Bending Moon
05. Slow Knife
06. Floating Forest
07. Love Theme
08. Approaching
09. Broken Fox - Black Hole
10. Breaking The Surface
11. In Your Skin
12. Warmer Light
13. Halogen Light
14. Lathe