The producer doth protest too loudly. After a few years of letting that low end ride on UK dubstep labels like Dub Police and Sub Soldiers, Leeds-hailing first-wave wobbler Rusko released his debut LP, the intermittently interesting crossover attempt O.M.G.!, in May of 2010. Another, more culturally resonant bass-heavy release emerged that year: Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, the breakout second EP from the ever-polarizing skronkmeister and recent triple-Grammy winner Skrillex. By the end of the year, Rusko was not only castigating the absurdly named "brostep" sub-genre affixed to artists like him and Skrillex-- he was taking responsibility for the whole thing. "Brostep is my fault, but now I've started to hate it, in a way," he told BBC 1Xtra DJ MistaJam. "I kind of took it there, and now everybody else is taking it too far." A year later and he was still on one, telling SPIN that the follow-up to O.M.G.! would be "a reaction to the masculine, dance-floor orientated, distorted mess that is the current state of dubstep."
Really, it's strange Rusko was stuck with the "brostep" tag to begin with: The closest association he has with Alpha Wub Delta types is the liberal sampling of dialogue from Guy Ritchie's rough-and-tumble frat-arthouse touchstone Snatch found on his and dubstep mainstay Caspa's 2007 Fabriclive mix. He is more than familiar with letting that bass run wild, albeit in less aggressive ways than his HARD Fest contemporaries-- but you either have to be narrow-minded or just plain ignorant of dance culture as a whole to think that rocking a system with cavernous rumble is a new thing.
All of which is to say Rusko's sour-grapes exhortations were probably a tad reactionary, the type of thing you might expect from a guy who recently threatened to leak his own record after his label, Mad Decent, arranged for a now-industry-standard online stream of it a few weeks before its release. Either way, we win, since on this sophomore LP, he's made some seriously twisted hooch from that puckered vine: A five-mile sprint away from easy categorization, Songs is a nasty carnival of electronic pop that giddily hops between styles-- jungle, rave, dub, purple, reggae, pure Guetta-fied pop, and so on-- like a broken radio. The nondescript album title refers to Rusko's nearly exclusive focus on vocal-heavy cuts, following O.M.G.!'s track-y vibe. There's a lot of toasting and wailing alike on this record, even if the former edges out the latter in terms of consistency.
"Proper" songs aren't a new look for Rusko; along with a fair share of pot-haze dubplate cuts that are reprised in spirit here, O.M.G.!'s broader gestures featured collaborations with Gucci Mane, Dirty Projectors' Amber Coffman, and Ben Westbeech, among others. In terms of melody-making, though, there's little on that album that matches the sticky one-two that kicks off Songs, "Somebody to Love" and "Pressure". The former is a rave-revivalist update of the Cofffman-sung "Hold On" that bests its predecessor; the latter is the album's big, early peak, a breezy treat of a song stuffed with handclaps, tart synth stabs, squiggly bass, and light-bathed keys. Dirty Radio's commanding vocal performance gives the song's first half a summery feel that wouldn't have sounded out of place on UK dubstep vocalist Katy B's excellent 2011 LP On a Mission, but the pyrotechnics really arrive during "Pressure"'s back half, where a heady flurry of chopped-up vocal hiccups tornado through the scenery. The whole thing just might end up being the best Basement Jaxx single put to tape this year.
Some might find the assertion to be heresy, but the Jaxx's legacy is invoked frequently throughout Songs-- not necessarily through sound itself, but compositionally. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe's whole-kitchen-sink-inside-the-kitchen-sink approach has always provided plenty of chewy stuff for those who love details; if Rusko's not an admirer of the pair, he's certainly a kindred spirit. There are more than a few packed clown cars here, tracks jammed up with sonic baubles both instantly noticeable (the junglist break folded within the "drop" of "Opium") and blink-and-you-miss-them subtle (is that really the "bonus level" sound from Sonic the Hedgehog pinging off the video-game tumble of "Asda Car Park"?). By my count, about half of Songs' 14 cuts feature what some would refer to as "drops," which are deployed with a sense of melodic, hedonistic humor and only add to the sheer sonic mayhem that frequently takes place here. That being said, if you're the type that views "drop" as a dirty word, you might want to avoid about half of this album.
Setting aside "Pressure", "Somebody to Love", and the enjoyable Eurocheese banger "Thunder", the main issue with Songs is that, for an album of "songs," there are too few pop cuts to work well as a whole. It's more of a pick-and-choose affair where the modern ability to fast-forward to your favorite musical moments, down to the second, is crucial. That also means that front-to-back listens can be exhausting. It's possible that the removal of the stormy, snoozy nü-ambient closer "M357", as well as the truly execrable faux-swag anthem and Worst Song of 2012 Thus Far contender "Dirty Sexy Money", would ease the fatigue, but honestly, I'd rather just hear an ADD-addled megamix of the entire album, one that runs at the globe-hopping speed that this material so seriously deserves.
