- Rich yet skeletal rhythm tracks from the US underground.
- The alley-oop has to be one of the best spectacles in basketball, and in sports in general. Player A floats a pass towards the basket so that player B can arrive, catch the ball mid-air, and slam it home. I mention this because a couple tracks on Leonce's debut EP for Night Slugs feel like the DJing equivalent of an alley-oop pass: a moment that could set up a dramatic expression of energy. On "Shutter Drums" and "Extrapolation," we tantalisingly wait for something that never arrives. The atmospheres are thick with latent potential as the creeping rhythms threaten to explode—or even expand—but never do. DJs who play the kind of globally informed club sounds Leonce deals in should have plenty of fun deciding the next track, giving dancers the pay-off dunk.
Between Tripwires and Penetration Testing, Leonce's recent first record on his new Morph Tracks label, we get a pretty clear picture of how this talented US artist has developed since 2017's Insurgency EP on Fade To Mind. Leonce said that Penetration Testing was largely inspired by African dance music, something that was most obvious in the record's melodies. Tripwires, meanwhile, feels more in the lineage of Leonce's skeletal, often sinister rhythm tracks, although there's now a pleasing sense of richness in the arrangements. The best example of this is the title track, where a field recording or sample of a natural environment, like the one framed by security cameras on the record's cover, is the backdrop to a churning 90-BPM groove embellished by a flute melody, a go-to instrument for Leonce.
The other tracks step from suspense to strength. "Quantanoir" is a house jam redolent of rainforests and the early '90s, before Leonce closes the EP with a slap. The New Jersey rapper Ash B turns in spiky verses—"I go harder than every last one of you, you can check my credentials"—over a clattering ballroom bounce. The manic mood takes something away from the EP's overall listening journey, but taken in isolation, "Shade Incarnate" is a stick of club dynamite.
Tracklist01. Tripwires
02. Shutter Drums
03. Quantanoir
04. Extrapolation
05. Shade Incarnate
06. Shade Incarnate (Instrumental)