After 28 years in business, XL Recordings occupies an enviable place in the hierarchy of record labels. Nominally, it’s an independent, but it has the punching power of a major—able to devote time and attention to artists big and small. Over the last three decades, XL’s releases have dictated sizable shifts in style and taste in music across the world, be it with enigmas like Jai Paul or megastars like Vampire Weekend or M.I.A.. Behind all this was Richard Russell, who joined the company as an A&R scout shortly after XL started in 1989. At XL, he helped discover Adele and has produced records for Gil Scott-Heron. Undeniably, Russell is one of the music industry’s most powerful players, with a rolodex that few can probably match.
But before he got wrapped up in the business of running a label, Russell had a budding career as a rave DJ and producer. He was one-half of the group Kicks Like a Mule (with XL co-founder Nick Halkes) and had a minor radio hit called “The Bouncer.” These last few years, however, Russell has stepped away from the daily operations of running XL and returned to his passion of making his own music. Released under the moniker Everything Is Recorded, the compact five-song EP Close but Not Quite serves as Russell’s proper debut as a musician.
Though, Russell, like in almost all of his work, is in the background of this music—an orchestrator rather than a frontman. For four of the tracks, he’s recruited vocalists to sing over his productions, while the closing track is a short instrumental. The EP is barely over 16-minutes long, and each of its tracks touches on a different genre, encapsulating Motown soul, grime, garage, UK bass, and more. Given that, Close but Not Quite is more of a sampler—a tasting menu of what Russell could possibly do in a larger project.
This is immediately apparent in how far apart the EP’s best song, its title-track and anchor featuring Sampha, differs from everything else on it. The song is built around a sample of Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 song “The Makings of You,” which Russell showed Sampha in a studio session, noting their falsettos were quite similar. The production from Russell bears a light touch—just featherweight piano chords, soft drums, and handclaps, tied together by winsome flourishes of colorful strings. Sampha and Russell deliver a ghostly duet that’s both uplifting and filled with ennui, as the song discusses how it is impossible to find the words to describe how one feels at any one moment.
The following track, “Early This Morning,” is a kind of slow, old-school grime track with British rapper Giggs. It’s a quick sea change from “Close but Not Quite,” with its blasts of sulfurous horns and blown out percussion. This song, too, is carved around a vocal sample: Russell’s production for Gil Scott-Heron’s “Me and the Devil,” a guttural baritone that is anything but relaxing. It’s insistent and sometimes haunting, though Giggs’ rapping is too clumsy to mesh with Scott-Heron. (It’s only a little funny when Giggs raps, “Got the coldest lyrics up in the folder/And got the cognac mixing up with the cola,” shortly after Scott-Heron talks about opening up the door to the devil.)
In fact, after “Close but Not Quite,” the EP never returns to its soulful start—making those blissful opening minutes seem like a red herring. Following “Early This Morning” is “Washed Up on the Shore” with Warren Ellis and Nigerian-born songwriter Obongjayar, which is equally ominous—laying on the hellfire and brimstone vibe thick. “D’elusion” is a collaboration with newcomers Infinite and Mela Murder, as well as Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, and it’s a rather crowded hodgepodge of electro-driven R&B and UK bass. Reprieve arrives with “The Rhythm of Life and Death,” the closing instrumental collage, which mixes together churning static, pianos, and cold drums. By the time you reach the end of this short collection, you’ll be hard pressed to find a single cohesive vision. Rather, it presents many possible records that it could have been, never settling into one comfortable mood.
