Pinch - Walking With Shadows / Ahh Fff Sss

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  • Pinch has made a banger or two in his time, but his best recent tracks tend towards restraint and glowering stasis. Take "Strobe Light" with Mumdance, which offered a moment of floaty repose in many sets late last year. Or the weightless gqom-meets-grime menacer "Cold New World." Or "Brain Scan," a pitter-patter of sci-fi drums over slow-mo low-end. It's a similar deal on the Bristol artist's return to Swamp81—home to one of his bigger '10s hits, "Croydon House"—after a half-decade absence. The brooding "Walking With Shadows" steals the show. With painterly drums and sparse bass, it sounds like an intro. The track's elegant halftime rhythms, weaving their way through rippling pads, gradually build to a beat, but Pinch shuts things down before they get out of hand. The B-side, "Ahh Fff Sss," similarly keeps its cool. Pinch sneaks in the "Anasthasia" stab—a canonical rave sound that could easily signal dance floor mayhem—but it's kept on a tight leash, sounding out against a greyscale backdrop of chord clusters and reverb-cloaked atmospherics. There is a sterner dance floor rudder to this one, a tense arrangement of claps, snares and flickering hi-hats that doesn't quite gel into a pulse-raising groove.
  • Tracklist
      A Walking With Shadows B Ahh Fff Sss
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