Not every new bass-music record has to be a huge sea change. At some point, it's good to recognize when music from an advancement-heavy scene actually succeeds as a workaday yet appealing synthesis of things that've already worked before. And when that synthesis is as broad-minded as Salva's debut, Complex Housing-- which reaches toward a unique fingerprint while still letting the seams of influence show-- that it clicks at all is an achievement in itself. Paul Salva, head of SF-area label Frite Nite, operates like the end product of cross-genre overload, the end result being an album that shows both the creative freedom and the unpredictability of someone who isn't in a big hurry to find a niche yet.
The trick to Salva's music is how it shrugs off attempts to pin down its elusive origin point. There's a noticeable stylistic affinity with the Low End Theory scene a ways down the California coast in the future-funk hip hop insinuations. But the threads that run through it touch on a checklist of important club music movements from the last decade-- neo-electro, Southern bounce, filter house, ghettotech, "purple" dubstep, turn-of-the-decade Dilla breaks, UK funky, pop grime, and boogie funk revival. It's less the affected accent of the kid who comes back from a year in England talking like a Guy Ritchie bit player, and more like the voice of a constantly moving Army brat who's let the dialects of five different regions shape his speech as he grows up.
The reason this succeeds hangs largely on Salva's ear for retrofitting familiar sonic tropes. Probably the easiest example to point to would be his cover of Robert Owens' "I'll Be Your Friend". Stripped to the chassis and rebuilt as a sparse, spacious yet evocative minimal-skewing revamp, the remake builds on a recognition of what made the original work rhythmically, shuffling roles around in its thorough modernization of an early-90s house anthem. The bassline becomes a minimoog melody, the 4/4 gains a slippery, skip-rhythm pulse, and the vocal is drawn out into hypnotic, delayed-payoff repetition mid-sentence ("I'll be your, I'll be your, I'll be your"). It's a good way to nod back to old heads, and it gives Salva's music a bit of grounding in a historical context that goes deeper than the past 10 years.
But the stuff that sticks to variants of more recent developments falls into place just as well, aided by a crowdpleasing notion of how a good melodic hook can be the same thing as a good rhythmic hook. It's most appealing, and most characteristic of an actual game plan, when there's at least a couple of those hooks jostling for space until they finally intersect. "Beached" pits buzzing, choppy synths against elastic digital space-funk bass and lets them work in tandem as a sort of dueling riff-break. And the dubstep-leaning "Blue" pulls off a similar trick with a rapid, hyperactive succession of shuddering throbs and warbles strung together and given a unifying structure by an intricate, Swiss-precise stagger-step backbeat.
The simpler and less frantic things get, the more pedestrian a track can feel-- the glimmering electro-house/UK funky fusion of "Keys Open Doors" and the shamelessly (yet effectively) Joker-aping "Icey" are catchy, but nothing earth-shaking-- yet even those moments still carry the weight of music that sounds like it comes from a place of genuine adventurousness. As much of a polyglot parade of signifiers as it sometimes threatens to become, Complex Housing coheres enough to make the quartet of other producers' remixes tacked on at the end feel like a distracting afterthought (even if they'd be good enough for a high-grade EP on their own). Underneath all the familiar sounds is the imprint of someone who knows how to make the pieces actually fit, and if it's still an issue of working out the difference between distillation and construction, at least this first step of progress has some engaging energy to it. Salva's clearly been listening to all the right records-- and learning all the right lessons.
