For an artist who came up under the dewy umbrella of lo-fi house, Australia’s Mall Grab has never been a particularly subtle producer. His early tracks were rudimentary affairs marked by blocky keys and classic Roland drum sounds squished through soupy tape-compression effects. He looked to memes for song titles; for hooks, he relied on pitched-down vocals that nodded to chopped and screwed hip-hop. One big early single, 2015’s “Guap,” invoked the dusty hip-house that Galcher Lustwerk had already been making for a couple of years.
As clubland trends have evolved, Mall Grab—aka 28-year-old Newcastle native Jordon Alexander—has moved beyond the lo-fi house template, but the haze in his music hasn’t cleared so much as congealed into a thick, oppressive murk. He’s beefed up his sound, becoming a reliable purveyor of big-room club fodder. Full of super-sized kick drums and relentless hi-hats, his drum programming packs a wallop; so do his synths, which flash back to the rave stabs of yore. His vocal samples aren’t much more nuanced. Part of a long tradition of songs sampling musicians talking about music, “Sheer Fuck-Offness” layers in an interview of a Newcastle DJ describing “the sheer fuck-offness” of a record; “Blood Flood” loops a muttered “Blood floods your eye” over apocalyptic synths and pile-driving drums.
At the same time, under his own name, Alexander has been quietly releasing music that’s less club-focused, more melancholy, and more stylistically diverse: atmospheric electro, beatless IDM, and even sad-sack bedroom pop halfway between shoegaze and Sebadoh. On What I Breathe, his debut album as Mall Grab, he brings the various sides of his musical identity together: bangers and ballads, atmospheric pads and hammering kicks, rabble-rousing rave and late-night ruminations.
He lays out his range in the first few tracks. The opening “Hand in Hand Through Wonderland” is twinkling electro, buoyant pads bristling with pitter-pat hi-hats. “I Can Remember It So Vividly” is a rollicking, 140 bpm floor-filler with a rubbery bassline and an insistent groove. And “Love Reigns” is a big, ebullient, ’90s-indebted piano-house anthem designed to elicit giddy smiles and molly-water tears at summer festivals. The first big curveball appears four tracks in, on “Understand,” where Turnstile’s Brendan Yates lends his sandpapery bark to a moody electro track that aims for pathos but ends up sounding more like Basement Jaxx’s “Where’s Your Head At” with all the fun sucked out.
Here and across the album, Alexander’s synths are the most compelling aspect of his music, telegraphing outsized emotions with a silvery flick of the waveform. But his drums come up wanting; too often, his programming feels formulaic, a way of filling in the empty space in the mix. In “Patience,” the steady hi-hats steamroll all the subtlety out of Nia Archives’ trip-hop-like vocals. In the hardstyle-influenced “Metaphysical,” flayed hi-hats and Amen breaks compete for attention with overblown bass and a shouted vocal sample that’s looped ad nauseum, as so many of his vocal samples are. Rather than compellingly heavy, it just feels leaden.
Alexander has described What I Breathe as a love letter to the dance-music legacy of London, where he’s lived for the past seven years. But beyond a handful of jungle breaks and a joint feature by grime MCs D Double E and Novelist, nothing here feels intrinsic to UK club history. Genuflecting to what Simon Reynolds has called the “hardcore continuum” is practically de rigueur in certain corners of UK-inspired dance music these days; What I Breathe doesn’t say anything new about the tradition that runs from the UK’s discovery of acid house through breakbeat hardcore, jungle, dubstep, and grime. Alexander simply gathers these sounds around him, badges of fealty to his adopted hometown.
There’s one more featured vocalist on the album: Alexander himself. He brings a mewling falsetto to “Without the Sun,” a bittersweet UK bass/house hybrid that vaguely resembles Larry Heard and Mr. White’s “The Sun Can’t Compare”; fusing the atmospheres of the Cure’s Wish with brittle grime production, the closing “Lost in Harajuku” is more unexpected, but Alexander’s understated monotone sounds reluctant to take the spotlight, and while the lyrics are hard to make out, the glimmer of Lost in Translation-like disorientation that sneaks through fails to elicit much sympathy. Taking a feature on his own album comes off as a kind of rhetorical trick, a suggestion that this, at least, is a glimpse of Jordon Alexander at his most personal. The problem is, he’s not a compelling enough presence to hold his own. Seven years into a career spent flipping familiar references into crowd-pleasing shapes, it’s still not clear who Alexander really is, beyond the sum of his influences.
