Scuba, a.k.a. Paul Rose, got his start making dubstep in the now-classic sense—heads-down, skunked-out, half-time steppers—but as UK dubstep evolved into "bass music," Scuba seemed the likeliest candidate to graduate to festival main stages. After a string of singles whose titles spoke to his newfound ambitions—"Adrenalin", "Flash Addict", "Hardbody"—he capped off his transformation with 2012's Personality, which married his sumptuous sound design to ecstatic piano house riffs, thundering four-to-the-floor bangers, and echoes of the Chemical Brothers' stadium-filling big beat.
But Rose made Claustrophobia in a year that, for health reasons, he took off from touring, and perhaps as a result, the album spends as much time looking inward as it does contemplating the reactions of the massing crowds. Stylistically, the album is roughly split between techno, ambient, and IDM; with one foot in the living room and one foot in the club, it suggests that Scuba's "big room" phase is over, at least for now.
Rose certainly hasn't turned his back on dancers; "Television", "PCP", and "Black on Black" are among the heaviest tracks in his catalog. So is the brilliant "Why You Feel So Low", a throbbing monster whose glowing low end faintly echoes the best of Consumed-era Plastikman. But his approach to techno is idiosyncratic. The pulsating "Levitation", left untethered to a kick drum, becomes an ambient track almost by default, and the same thing happens to the aptly named "Drift". A more conventional artist would have chained both to a four-to-the-floor anchor, but Rose seems to have faith that the listener doesn't always need a metronomic handrail.
Scuba's music has always sounded wonderful—warm, rich, enveloping, ultra-vivid—but Claustrophobia feels like a major step up; the sonics are simply dazzling. Rattled keys, wind chimes, rubbed wineglass rims, half-heard voices, and all manner of incidental rustle serve to make the music leap from the speakers. "All I Think About Is Death" pairs those tricks with a woman's mournful singing to create an entrancing update of trip-hop. "Needle Phobia" starts out as a dead ringer for the drone that opens Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II before morphing into a shuddering tribute to the sound of Autechre's Amber LP. And then there's "Family Entertainment"—just two-and-a-half minutes of wailing babies and hospital acoustics that swell into a disconcerting fluttering in the ears. As it dissolves into a spray of static, it has the ring of hard-won epiphany.
There's a moment on "Television" where the music just stops, with a massive crescendo giving way to nothing but a thumping kick drum. It feels a little bit like that gag in the Road Runner cartoons where Wile E. Coyote goes skittering off over the edge of the cliff, and the same anticlimactic fake-out crops up again on "Drift", a moody thrum that briefly threatens to go full-bore and then changes its mind at the last minute: There's a heart-in-mouth crescendo, a roll of the drums, and then, just where you'd expect pyrotechnics, inky silence. And it happens again on "Black on Black", the kind of sooty, industrial-tinged banger that Scuba can seemingly turn out in his sleep. It's a clever trick: instead of beating audiences over the head, it reels them in; instead of projecting outwards, it reflects inwards.
Scuba's album titles have always tended to read pretty literally: Triangulation suggested his path through dance music's crowded waters, tacking and jibing between techno and dubstep; Personality reflected the swagger of a newfound confidence. But Claustrophobia doesn't seem quite so straightforward. Far from sounding backed into a corner, after a strategic retreat from the big time, Rose seems right at home.
