- On his third album-as-diary, the UK house music star tries to appeal to everyone and ends up stranded in the middle of the road.
- There's something simultaneously flashy and introspective about Fred Gibson. His music is meant to be intensely personal: bite-sized house tracks with diaristic names, based around voice memos, phone calls and samples of his favourite songs. It's as fitting for the festival stage as it is for listening to in bed. He also has an obvious flair for performance, with an infamous finger drumming routine and other live tricks that dazzle his audiences. (Notably, this summer's Boiler Room London video racked up millions of views in just over a week.) He's amassed a gigantic fanbase that goes far and beyond dance music heads, and has collaborated with everyone from Four Tet to Ed Sheeran to Swedish House Mafia. He's an unassuming superstar with bright, catchy music that seems designed to please everyone.
Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) is the third in a series of albums documenting Gibson's life since the beginning of the pandemic. All three records weld personal artifacts to beats that farm the fertile crescent between sweetness and melancholy, the kind of stuff that would wow a crowd during a sunset. This third one, though, comes in the wake of increasing fame and attention, and though it's loaded with snippets of chatter, the personal has been replaced with the generic. Here Gibson rifles through existing songs and samples them wholesale, instead of weaving together new melodies or verses from his travels and relationships. This doesn't have to be a bad thing, but listen to first single "Danielle (smile on my face)" and you'll hear a half-baked remix of 070 Shake's "Nice To Have," with all the nuance of the vocal flattened out into a galloping Overmono-lite beat.
To his credit, Actual Life 3 has plenty of swoon-worthy moments: "Delilah (pull me out of this)" beams with childlike wonder and imagination, while "Kelly (end of a nightmare)" and "Bleu (better with time)" pop with the pneumatic rhythms and samples of the best post-dubstep tracks. But too often, it feels like Gibson has lobotomized his source material. He says he chose the vocal for "Kammy (like i do)" because he thought the line "No one can love you like I do" was suffocating rather than romantic—but his track has all the emotional tension of a Uniqlo dressing room. And then there's "Clara (the night is dark)," a cloying song based around a hymn that would feel hard to swallow coming from even the most mawkish EDM stars. Ditto for "Winnie (end of me)," which could be Gibson's shot at a wedding first-dance song, but the song's weepy lyrics don't match the misty-eyed instrumental. It's hard to tell if it was meant to be sad or joyous, and it feels empty instead.
Gibson is undeniably a massive talent, first catching the ear of his family's neighbour Brian Eno when he was just 16. In just a few years he's blazed a path across the mainstream and the underground in a way that few of his peers have been able to. Anthemic dance music is second nature to him, and you get the feeling that he can whip up these tracks with his eyes closed. But in his quest to appeal to as many people as possible, to make the personal universal, the quality of his music has suffered: what once felt like an intimate glimpse into his life ("Jessie (i miss you") and friendships ("Marea (we've lost dancing)") now has the feel of an organized backstage meet-and-greet. Gibson's earlier work mixed pop mastery with genuine feeling. Actual Life 3 is the Hollywood remake, with not-quite-convincing lookalikes and a script laden with clichés.