- Whatever form FaltyDL's music takes—garage, hip-hop, hardcore, and plenty else—you can usually count on finding an appealing tenderness. It's more pronounced when his music wanders from the dance floor, as on his last album, Heaven Is For Quitters, but it was also there on EPs like the excellent Not For Press, which softened AFX-style drums with lotion-like drops of melody. The results on his latest EP, Three Rooms, sometimes show the limits of this tendency to sooth. Take the organ riff on "Big Room." It adopts a rowdy pose, but the watery reverb and mulchy low-end dampen its enthusiastic gestures.
Lustman sounds more at home in the smaller "rooms." "Medium Sized Room"'s synth lead and vocal are pleasingly bright and nimble, but it's not without flaws. The atmospheric intro and outro seem incidental to what's in between, and the track's interplay can feel too orderly. "Small Room (Fake Smiling Faces)" plays to Lustman's strengths. The down-pitched sample, from Undisputed Truth's "Smiling Faces Sometimes," and the jarring horn lend an anxiously soulful feel, at which Lustman excels.
Tracklist01. Big Room
02. Medium Sized Room
03. Small Room (Fake Smiling Faces)