For better or worse, the science-fiction concept album is a dance-music staple. In addition to being saddled with one of the most ungainly album titles of the year, Biasonic Hotsauce: Birth of the Nanocloud is the first part of a proposed trilogy of albums where UK garage/drum'n'bass/dubstep producer Zed Bias will tell the tale of… an experiment gone wrong? Something vaguely futuristic? To be honest, I've listened to this thing a bunch of times now, and the narrative thrust remains elusive.
And the storyline, confined to a few ignorable skits of kitschy playacting, barely impinges on the music. Instead, the "Nanocloud" concept seems more like a flimsy and silly but ultimately harmless way to unite a dozen-plus tracks that might otherwise seem to belong on wholly different albums. Like many producers who refused to go away quietly when grime and dubstep stole UK garage's thunder, Bias has explored as many styles and subgenres as he's been able to get away with since his turn-of-the-millennium UKG glory days. So there's not much of a "signature" on Biasonic Hotsauce and certainly not much you haven't heard before if you've been following British dance music for the last 10 years. From hammering dancehall-inflected dubstep to slickly anonymous commercial house, Bias treats BH like an outsider-friendly party tape, heavy on the obvious hooks and boisterous rapping and layer of high-end gloss applied to even the starkest tracks.
This little-bit-of-everything approach to modern UK dance culture is welcome, given how alienating "pure" dubstep records can be for non-fans. Biasonic Hotsauce can sometimes feel like an alternate universe take on Kevin Martin's the Bug project, with the nuclear-grade noise swapped out for radio-friendliness. (Or at least pirate-radio-friendliness.) But the jack-of-all-dance-trades tack also reveals that, for all his restless experimentation, Bias' skill set hasn't evolved much over the last decade. What he does best here-- merging the boom of Jamaican ragga with the runway-show opulence of deep house and the punchy-but-still-pop beats of R&B and soca-- sounds remarkably similar to the sound that first brought him to underground prominence over a decade ago.
The great early run of tracks on BH work the same beguiling and unstable middle ground, where the rhythmic dexterity of high-class dance music for grown-ups meets blunt-force street kid grit, which defined the late-1990s/early-00s peak of UK garage. The low-end of "Yagga" has all the thuggish heaviness of dubstep, but the frisky rhythms show up the genre's stereotypical thump as a drag. Though BH has enough bass wobble and crass Ibiza synth hooks to mark it out definitively as a 2011 release, the drums on the first-tier tracks still have the intricate and far more interesting syncopations of old-school garage. It's sad but telling that Bias is still leaning on his biggest and best tune here, 2000's uptown dancehall smash "Neighbourhood", given a wholly unnecessary dubstep-era update for BH.
After that bracing opening stretch, there are a handful of half-brilliant tracks in the same vein strewn across the album, especially the shiver-inducing "Lucid Dreams", echoing the minimalist future funk and disembodied vocals that once defined UKG at its outermost, without the dour murk Burial now brings to the mix. But whenever Bias leaves his comfort zone, the excitement and energy drains away, and he comes up with tracks that settle for being competent style exercises, like "Koolade" with its campy take on 1980s boogie. The final trio of "straight" dubstep tracks are just too damn polite to even be called bangers, risking neither the grossly enjoyable excess of the genre's populist wing nor the form-pushing innovation of its avant school. As so often when it comes to dance-music full-lengths, Bias' good ideas get lost in the sea of makeweight stuff, and his attempt to please just about everyone results in a frustratingly spotty album.
