- "Rage Against The Light," from Deadbeat's 2015 album, Walls & Dimensions, was based on the Dylan Thomas poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. His latest album, Wax Poetic For This Our Great Resolve, finds the Canadian producer staring into another abyss. It was conceived as a response to the Trump presidency, environmental disaster and other global crises. Yet his latest LP's predominant emotion isn't rage. Monteith asked friends to record "messages of hope," then constructed tracks around what he received, naming each one after the 17 contributors assembled here.
The album's monologues are delivered in six different languages, but even polyglots will have trouble understanding everything. The voices are sometimes sunk deep in the mix. When they are foregrounded, as on "Steve And Fatima," Steve Knell's didactic lecture on the rise of populism stands in unflattering contrast to the subtle arrangement of the music beneath it. Far more interesting is a track like "Chato And Avril," where the vocals are finely diced to form part of the rhythm.
The astonishing sound design and digital production techniques on albums like 2011's Drawn And Quartered made them dub techno masterpieces. Here, Monteith recorded both live instruments and the sounds of his software through microphones at his Berlin studio. The results give the LP an organic, tactile dimension. The percussion is loose and natural. You can almost sense the air vibrating around the plucked guitar strings that introduce "Laetitia," or reverberate over the dubwise rhythm of "Hebatallah And Bashar." A melodica snakes through "Argenis And Christobal"'s smoky atmosphere, and is transformed into an urgent clarion call when Monteith turns up the soundystem pressure on "Me And Marco."
The textures of some of these old-school dub influences are balanced with more contemporary sounds. "Thomas," featuring Thomas Fehlman, has a funky electronic bassline that could easily belong to one of the German artist's housier sets. "Gudrun" is dub techno as sonically expansive as anything to bear the Deadbeat name. Wax Poetic For This Our Great Resolve largely succeeds as the grand statement about community and connections Monteith intended. The music, meanwhile, says a great deal about the quality of his craft.
Tracklist01. Martin
02. Steve And Fatima
03. Gudrun
04. Argenis And Cristobal
05. Chato And Avril
06. Hebatallah And Bashar
07. Thomas
08. Me And Marco
09. Momo And Yuzo
10. Laetitia
11. Mike And Judy