If a certain punk band hadn’t gotten there first, then Anarchy in the UK would have made an excellent alternative title for Woke Up Right Handed, the third EP this year—and the first for UK super-indie XL—from British post-dubstep survivor Blawan. Woke Up Right Handed doesn’t so much ignore the rules of electronic music as stumble around blissfully unaware of their existence, the kind of record that plumps for a parabolic curve when asked to choose between left and right. The result, happily, is Blawan’s most interesting work in years, a return to the turbulent spirit of the Brandy-sampling “Getting Me Down” or the comedy tech-horror of “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” after years of largely furrowed-brow techno.
Like “Bodies,” Woke Up Right Handed is, at its best, a surprisingly funny record, employing a dark humor that feeds off the preposterous and the grotesque. “Under Belly,” the EP’s standout track, is techno re-tooled for maximum nervous laughter, sporting a thoroughly ridiculous, steel-clad electronic shape that collywobbles around like an iron slug in a jelly. To compound matters, this is set to an electronic rhythm closer to the twist than to Tiësto and carried by a bassline forged of volcanic rumbles. The song’s charred-metal sculpture will be familiar to fans of Blawan’s 2018 debut album, Wet Will Always Dry (a record that also featured a killer hook, on “Careless”), or his more recent Soft Waahls EP. But Wet Will Always Dry largely played out within the 4/4 strictures of techno, a shadow that the more adventurous Soft Waahls also couldn’t quite escape. On “Under Belly” the brakes are firmly off: There is scant pattern to the song, an almost total disregard for dancefloor convention, and little separation between musical elements. It’s like a techno record that has been rescued from a lava flow.
There’s nothing quite as outlandish on the rest of this EP, but Blawan’s mischievous spirit rules throughout. Both “Close the Cycle” and “Gosk” sport riffs that could, in other hands (or perhaps in Blawan’s own, were he feeling less impish) become the kind of sledgehammer ear-worm motifs that translate into lucrative Ibiza club residencies. But Blawan treats them with the disdain of minor irritations. The tightly wound electronic coil that powers through “Gosk” is scattered to the wind by a bizarre mechanical scurrying and a snare drum for whom repetition is just a word in the dictionary, while the thick, serpentine riff of “Close the Cycle” refuses to sit still in the mix, its inconstant, boggy squelch as treacherous as quicksand.
“Close the Cycle,” in particular, feels like a work of deliberate obfuscation. The song features a vocal from Blawan, whose catchy rhythmic patterns and half-submerged words never quite converge into recognizable phrases, leaving the enthusiastic listener off balance. “Blika,” which opens the EP, is similar. What does “Blika” mean, anyway? And what is the other phrase Blawan solemnly intones over the song’s flinty, crab-like beat? We may never know. But perhaps uncertainty is the perfect response to this deliciously amorphous EP. Like any good anarchic work, Woke Up Right Handed stands for subversion over structure and diversion over devoir.
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