- Joy Orbison gets intimate, even subdued, on his first full-length release.
- While I would hardly call him "mysterious," Joy Orbison keeps a low profile for someone who has been so influential on the sound of dance music over the last decade-plus. He's let a little light in recently: a spate of interviews accompanied Slipping, an EP adorned with family photos and taking a more or less dance floor-focused tack than past records. Now there's still slipping vol. 1, an album (or mixtape, in Joy's preferred terms) pairing recordings of his friends and family chatting with brief but impressive sonic vignettes. It's kind of like the audio equivalent of looking at a great painter's pencil sketchbook. still slipping vol. 1 presents the artist at his most relaxed, trading anthems for well-produced genre workouts, inspired collaborations and a sepia-toned wistfulness that matches the nostalgic visuals.
"The minute you change the language to mixtape, nobody cares," says a voice at the end of "sparko," a twitchy collaboration with Herron that revolves around a monstrous Reese bassline. I have to disagree with this mystery woman—a Joy Orbison full-length, whether you call it a mixtape or an album, has to be among the most hotly-anticipated ideas in UK dance music writ large. As he explained it in an interview with Apple Music: "Dance albums always feel very put on a pedestal. But with hip-hop tapes, there's so much energy and excitement. It feels really fresh and unpretentious."
While Joy Orbison hasn't exactly made a rap mixtape, the flow of still slipping vol. 1 is both unhurried and unpredictable. These musical ideas last only as long as they need to. A track like "Better," where Lea Sean's smoky voice rides a single clammy dub chord, is a fully-fledged song, while other tracks like the woozy dive-bombing trap of "runnersz" are experiments that try something out quickly and then move out of the way. Much of this music sounds surprisingly like late '90s experimental techno—think ~scape, Force Inc. or Mille Plateaux—in the way it balances foggy atmosphere with discrete, intricate and hard-to-place sounds and rustles.
The music on still slipping vol. 1 is Joy Orbison's most subdued, but his production is so incredible that even the more sedate tracks, like the downtempo "froth sipping" or downcast drum & bass of "layer 6," still have a real oomph to them. They're ear candy for fellow producers and punters alike. And it sounds like Joy is having fun with this creative freedom: "Bernard" has a bold swagger—he describes it as "New Order making a hip-hop beat"—that feels uncharacteristically brash, while the excellent "swag," featuring a dextrous verse from James Massiah, sounds like the simple, pitch-perfect throwback 2-step track Joy Orbison has been dying to make all these years.
There are no huge year-defining anthems on still slipping vol. 1, but most of it still plays to Joy Orbison's strengths, none more than the final track "born slipping" (maybe the closest thing to a potential breakout hit.) It has a meditative, garage-inspired strut that chops TYSON's vocals into breathy sounds that surface like condensation on a window pane, with all of that pop-calibre vocal cutting that made Joy Orbison famous from the get-go. Only now the vocals sound more intimate, more of a sigh than a gasp.
"born slipping" closes the album with what sounds like a livingroom discussion with his family, full of chuckles and jokes, the kind of thing that feels voyeuristic to listen to. It's one of a few clips of Joy's family and friends that surface randomly on the mixtape—my favourite is when his sister leaves a voicemail describing a day out drinking daiquiries and eating weed cookies at the end of "playground"—with a workaday familiarity that adds a vague, if undeniable, warmth to the music.
The voice recordings are more aesthetic than deep. In fact, they remind me of the bits of chatter that surface throughout Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon, tossed-off phrases that don't necessarily have much to do with the music but become part of it anyway. You learn to expect them as you get to know the record better. That still slipping vol. 1 could become so familiar and endearing speaks a lot to the success to Joy Orbison's approach: this isn't a dead-serious album placed on a pedestal but a casual, unhurried listen put together by one of the greatest producers in UK dance music. You hear clips of his family phoning him and wondering where he is, as if he were just like any of us. It might not be the long-awaited dive into Joy Orbison's psyche that some fans crave, but if nothing else, still slipping vol. 1 is an honest and humanizing document, giving us a deeper look into the musical styles and influence that drive Joy Orbison than anything else we've heard before.
Tracklist01. w/ dad & frankie
02. sparko (w/ herron)
03. swag w/ kav (w/ james messiah & bathe)
04. better (w/ léa sen)
05. bernard?
06. runnersz
07. 'rraine (w/ edna)
08. glorious amateurs
09. s gets jaded
10. froth sipping
11. layer 6
12. in drink
13. playground (w/ goya gumbani)
14. born slipping (w/ tyson)