In just five or six years, Skrillex has gone from being a dance music underdog to a decoder ring through which, for many Americans, electronic music finally makes sense. Once our prince of dubstep, now he’s one of pop culture’s savviest tastemakers—the rare figure capable of collaborating with Korn and Rick Ross and Justin Bieber—and an equally savvy entrepreneur, thanks to his prolific OWSLA label. Not unlike his onetime collaborator Chance the Rapper, he’s a self-actualized model for the 21st-century music industry.
Part of his upstart appeal has meant standing apart from old sounds like house and techno—vestiges of the fuddy-duddy old school compared to Skrillex’s brash cadre of iconoclasts. But house music’s four-to-the-floor thump has been creeping its way into his sets: At Burning Man’s Robot Heart party last year, he played nearly an hour’s worth of pitter-pat beats from artists like Psychemagik and Four Tet, opting for gradual blends over his usual slash-and-burn style. Now HOWSLA, as its title punningly makes clear, represents his label’s attempt to tackle house music.
So far, so good. There is, after all, room for everyone in house music; house, as Chuck Roberts established way back in 1987, is a feeling. Developed in the mid-1980s as an offshoot of disco, largely in Chicago and Detroit and New York, house music has spread around the world in its three decades on the planet, morphing all the way. Acid, deep house, minimal, kwaito, garage, 2-step, ghetto house, Baltimore club, tech-house, tribal, dirty Dutch—all these subgenres tweak the boom-ticking rhythmic cadence that makes house as sturdily versatile a musical form as you’ll find.
Skrillex’s compilation presents a focused take that’s largely modeled on bassline house, a style from the northern UK that’s distinguished by greasy low-end melodies, hard-thwacked drums, and a slippery, skippy sense of swing. That makes sense: Bassline’s design is in keeping with Skrillex’s own dental-drill sonics, and on HOWSLA, the hi-def low end is the center of attention throughout. Here it’s a doddering bumblebee; there it’s a caffeinated foghorn. The bass on nearly all the tracks is actually two sounds in one: a glowering, ultra-low frequency with a needling high-end counterpoint. They are thunderheads ringed with silver, or elephants dipped in glitter, and their legato settings send them slipping and sliding up and down the scale in seasick fits.
Atop those woozy figures, the compilation’s tracks stitch together a patchwork of dance-music signifiers: disco’s string vamps, garage’s shuffling syncopations, B-more club’s skipping kick drums, and progressive house’s vertiginous drum crescendos, rising in pitch to punctuate each subsequent drop. Roman Flügel’s “Geht’s Noch?” and Mr. Oizo’s “Flat Beat” are distant forebears of HOWSLA’s elastic jack tracks; a closer relation is Claude VonStroke’s Dirtybird label, whose West Coast vibes permeate Alex Metric’s slinky “Freeek” and Skrillex & Habstrakt’s wriggly, good-natured “Chicken Soup.” The garish style of EDM known as “dirty Dutch,” meanwhile, holds sway over the comp’s more beat-you-over-the-head moments, like the rushing snare rolls and blaring police siren of Marc Spence’s “On Air.”
Many of these songs are essentially just one idea mapped to a beat: “On Air” uses its loping drum groove as the vehicle for a single blast of bass; “Lasers” sets up its titular zaps with a spoken-word snippet about the same. Sometimes it works: Wiwek’s lean “Run,” the comp’s most hypnotic track, is a modern-day take on tribal house, complete with a rainforest's worth of squawks and ululations. But too often, the songs rely on gimmicky vocal hooks to keep the listener interested. The quirky nonsense rhymes of “Chicken Soup” are engaging enough, but Dances With White Girls’ hook on Chris Lake’s “Operator (Ring Ring)” wears its Green Velvet influence a little too visibly on its sleeve, while the heavy-breathing come-ons of Lake’s “I Want You” just sound thirsty. And on JOYRYDE's "New Breed," it's hard to escape the impression that the former psy-trance child prodigy is relying on the rapper Darnell Williams’ hardboiled references to lend his music a street patina.
Still, OWSLA fans will probably thrill to the music’s mixture of stonking bass, cracking beats, and hip-hop swagger. Longtime househeads may not; to anyone who prizes the deeper end of house, HOWSLA’s hard surfaces and chatty vocals will be exhausting. The main problem here is the material here doesn’t meet the goal OWSLA set for itself. “MISSION STATEMENT,” reads a block of text in the album’s press materials: “To push the timeless genre of house music forward for a younger generation by showcasing a new breed of producers pushing the boundaries of the genre in every direction.” If he really wants to represent house music’s vanguard, Skrillex and co-curator Chris Lake—whose biggest solo hit is just cornball commercial house with “indie” guitars —might have selected a different crop of artists. But house music doesn’t need pushing forward; it’s moving along just fine on its own. And the house revival has been a thoroughly mainstream phenomenon for years now, ever since Disclosure, Duke Dumont, and even Calvin Harris helped tip the charts away from big-tent EDM and toward house music’s cozier vibe. For the first time in his career, Skrillex feels behind the curve.
