- I met Henry Keen in Cuba last year, where he and his brother Ollie were putting together a collaboration with the local band Ache Meyi for Manana festival. He—like everyone—was out of his comfort zone there, working with minimal equipment, tight deadlines and a language barrier. The collaboration, which has since been released on the Manana label, ended up being one of the festival's best. The second full EP under his The Room Below alias finds him on home turf. Even more so than 2015's Homemade Waves EP, Healing Scaphoids sounds warm, relaxed and comfortable in its own skin.
Keen is a 70's Baby, as a recent album title put it, and his music tracks the soul, funk and jazz of the era via turn-of-the-millennium dance developments: deep house and, crucially, West London broken beat. The drum kits are warm and roomy, replete with claps and clicks, sidesticks and woody kick drums. Basslines are casual but firm, while synths burble and coo like happy birds. Keen also keeps things loose structurally. Key motifs tend to sidle gently in and out of frame, as with the keys referenced in the title of "On The Rhodes," or the chord changes in the latter half of "Icy." Both of those tracks lope forwards on syncopated kick drums, but things straighten out with the dreamy 4/4 of "Ants In Amber"—though its percussion twitches and swings as if trying to break free from its gentle straitjacket. The unsettled feeling persists on "Black Cast," where the clap and chords sit just before the two and four, unbalancing the groove—a broken beat trick made new.
TracklistA1 On The Rhodes
A2 Icy
B1 Ants In Amber
B2 Black Cast