- A respected drum & bass artist looks to garage and deep house on this excellent EP.
- DJs and producers blending genres is now commonplace. They take a bit of this, a bit of that—it's the way things are done these days. What's less common, though, and arguably harder to achieve, is what Dominick Martin does as Calibre. The Northern Irish artist, who's most widely known for drum & bass, often mixes styles, but he's great at what you might call genre studies. In other words, he writes pure versions of many different genres, shot through with this signature melancholy, and usually nails it.
Break That, his latest release for Craig Richards' label, The Nothing Special, features one of the better deep house tracks I've heard this year. It's dead simple. There's a slow and heavy beat. Some string stabs and jazzy adornments. A bass guitar funks up the low-end. And it's dripping with feeling. Depending how you look at it, "Break That" is either a garage or a proto-dubstep cut. Its bassline, in particular, has some Croydon attitude, but the drums maintain an air of sophisticated restraint. Skipping ahead a couple years on the continuum, "Wassold" and "Diamond Dub" are lights-low dubstep tracks. Both are strong but "Diamond Dub" is more more dynamic: it features a wobbly-but-refined LFO bassline, dub delays and plenty of movement in the drums. It's a nice example of how Martin is not only replicating the best of the genres he's working with, but doing it with flair.
TracklistA1 Horange
A2 Wassold
B1 Break That
B2 Diamond Dub