The first original Sandwell District record in 13 years, End Beginnings, arrives at a low ebb for Serious Dance Music. The big DJs are called Fingerblast and Fart in the Club; the even bigger ones wear dressing gowns and horse masks. You can launch a career by going viral in a fake toilet or a real kitchen. And the future of physical media appears to be in rocks (£1,000, please). In a recent interview, Karl O’Connor and Dave Sumner proposed End Beginnings as an attempt to save music from “stupidity.” But the album is less dour than that declaration suggests. Sandwell District built their catalog on vast architectural space and to-the-millimeter precision; now, more than a decade since their last record, End Beginnings is the sound of the collective letting loose.
Much of the appeal of Sandwell District, the “techno boy band” that blew up in acrimony in 2012—there were fistfights, airline bans, and one hotel afterparty that ended only after military intervention—lay in their totalizing sense of hermetic perfection, a modernist’s Platonic ideal of what techno could be. (Their late-2010 album Feed-Forward, reissued two years ago, remains one of the genre’s finest LPs of the 21st century.) Alongside this spellbinding purism, an unholy union of Säkhö and Carl Craig, came an unusually striking visual style: a psychonautic peep show of jaw-headed bikers and rockabilly ghouls that helped insulate the music from the militant dullness typical of dance music’s conservative wing, for whom only mannered reserve will do.
The current Sandwell District lineup is missing one of its pillars: the irreplaceable DJ, producer, and visual artist Juan Mendez, aka Silent Servant, who, alongside his wife, Simone Ling, and friend Luis Vasquez, died last year. (O’Connor recently told Resident Advisor that he also nearly perished earlier this year, narrowly surviving a 100 mph head-on collision.) The rust-on-white artwork for End Beginnings is a deliberate break from Mendez’s leather droogs and inky voids, though the title is taken from one of his unfinished artworks that had been slated for this album. In a similar spirit, some of the music also pivots away from the collective’s established jet-black forms. In an electro track like “Citrinitas Acid,” a doleful android tearjerker, O’Connor, Sumner, and their expanded roster of collaborators—among them Mønic and Rivet, who helped O'Connor and Sumner finish the LP—make fruitful tweaks to the group’s gloomy register.
But as a successful expansion of the house style, “Citrinitas Acid” is the exception rather than the rule. On “Hidden,” a dominant acid pulse wills itself to big-room fervor, but its intensity seems slightly forced; it urges, rather than commands, people to the dancefloor. The nocturnal hum and clack of “Dreaming,” which sounds like a metro line running through mangroves, carries a few too many passengers, including a temple chant that a sterner edit would’ve cut loose. There are still more granular problems elsewhere. End Beginnings shows an understandable desire to crack open the Sandwell District aesthetic, but the album too often struggles to express these ideas with the tyrannical clarity heard on, say, the malignant deep freeze of Function’s Isolation, or Sleeparchive’s Elephant Island, by which O’Connor and Sumner were so influenced.
But you can’t sustain improbably high standards forever. In the early ’70s, the Romanian coach Ștefan Kovács took over as manager of Ajax, the Dutch soccer club, from Rinus Michels, the inventor of what’s called “total football” and a collector of fearsome nicknames (the Bull, the General, the Dictator, and, probably, the Bastard). Initially, the team—itself a talented yet combustible group—flourished under Kovács’ relaxed stewardship. The best moments of End Beginning similarly suggest the liberated promise of a new era. The atmospheric filigree of “Self-Initiate” lends an otherwise taut interplay of drone-flight bass trails and dramatic chords a magisterial scope; “Will You Be Safe?” and “Restless” are stylish and explosive spin-offs of the Sandwell District sound. But just as Ajax’s discipline slackened under Kovacs’ more forgiving hand, the newly democratic Sandwell District has obscured something essential in its identity. The sense remains that loosening the music’s iron grip—the fanatical ruthlessness that once drove Sumner to summon O’Connor across Berlin just to hear “a fucking tone”—has allowed the opportunity for a more radical reinvention to slip away.
