- With over a decade of music to his own name and a handful of aliases, Paul Woolford doesn't have much to prove. (Planet E, still high on its 20th birthday celebration, really doesn't either.) And that's a large part of what makes Woolford's latest (which is somewhat surprisingly his first for Carl Craig's fabled imprint) a good little 12-inch, if not one that will knock you off your feet: Achilles / Razor Burn is solid, pretense-free techno that suggests Woolford has no interest in either reinventing himself or cashing in his chips anytime soon.
"Achilles" begins with a firm kick drum push and warm bassline, and it really doesn't get much more complicated than that; the tart, filter-y chords that wade in throughout the track always feel on the verge of really blowing up, but Woolford instead pulls them back in, letting the cap off the steam valve only with occasional flumes of cymbal reverb. "Razor Burn" is a bit more lively, but perhaps only by a hair. The rhythm here has a nearly stepping feel, which Woolford backs up with stabs of playfully aggressive bass. But despite its shades of A Made Up Sound, "Razor Burn" is not the sound of Woolford or Planet E going post-dubstep on us; it feels like that little extra twitch came to them, not the other way around.
Tracklist A Achilles
B Razor Burn