- Jaw-dropping club music.
- When you put on "Rudnick," the lead track from the new EP by Zambia's SHE Spells Doom, it's hard to decide which element is the most arresting. (Or it's hard for me to decide, anyways.) There's that deliciously wobbly chord progression that makes up the backbone of the song, but there's also the fat-bottomed kick drums, or the slippery hi-hats that emerge once in a while, used sparingly to great effect. The whole thing is gleaming and shiny, as if it were made from some finely wrought metals. The easiest way I can think to describe it is a xerox of an old Southern rap beat on a Livity Sound white-label. It traces an unusual throughline between hip-hop, cutting-edge UK dance music and the kind of cross-genre club music coming from artists like Slikback or Tzusing. I've probably listened to it more than any other dance track this year—it's as close to perfect as a club tune can be.
That would make for a top-heavy EP, but the other two tracks hold up the weight just fine. "Jet Black" hits harder, with a shoulder-checking rhythm like UK funky wearing steel-toed boots. This one plays the classic loud-quiet dynamics game, sometimes dropping its hypnotic chord progression for almost martial passages of straight percussion, the kind of thing bound to pull some interesting shapes on the dance floor.
Then there's "Earthly Pleasures," the bounciest track on the EP and maybe the most technically impressive arrangement, with hints of an ominous baseline that sounds as if it were borrowed from a brooding Afro house anthem. All three of these tracks mix global strains of dance music in truly inventive ways, and the results so intuitive that they should please a listener interested in pretty much any of the genres listed above. Music this clever rarely sounds this effortless and natural, or in other words, irresistibly danceable.
Tracklist01. Rudnick
02. Jet Black
03. Earthly Pleasures