Scott Montieth (Deadbeat) pours rainwater over his dub. Just about every thunder clap on the snare, prick of the guitar string, amniotic keyboard melody, weathered-vinyl hum, and synthesizer blurt flows into a gutter-- disintegrating bit by bit in the runoff. When the Montreal artist released Wild Life Documentaries in 2002, his miles-deep bass and snare-chipped rhythms remained faithful to Kingston at a time when so many laptop-bohos took Pole's "digital dub" premise and thoroughly sterilized it.
While dub is typically revered for its clockwork rhythm that snaps the mind into a trance, what is heard between the beats and the notes matter just as much. In the Wild Life and its equally hypnotic follow-up, Something Borrowed, Something Blue, Montieth found uncanny beauty in the rainwater effect as his music evoke the sensation of brain synapses struggling to recall vague memories amid a narcotic haze. Cynics could dismiss Montieth's much of sleek electro-percussion and glossy synth flourishes as mere filler for Hollywood suspension flicks. However, Montieth still taps into a netherworld of disjointed time, place and memory that intoxicates as much as enchants, all deftly proven in New World Observer.
The "new world" as presented in Montieth's latest LP is impossible to determine. The atmospherics are darker than on his previous joints; the grooves are more fractured and uneasy. A weariness pervades here, as personified by the watercolors dripped by guest vocalist Athesia. Judging by a few song titles, Montieth is drawing illustrations of a Middle East damaged by the grave contradictions of U.S. foreign policy with a broken charcoal pencil and blood-smeared fingertips. "Abu Ghraib" begins with a distorted sample of Rush Limbaugh whitewashing the damning photos of American servicemen torturing and humiliating Iraqi detainees for pleasure. After comparing such sadism to frat-boy play, the apologist asked his listeners, "Have you ever heard of emotional release?" to which another voice, possibly Montieth's, snaps an echoing "fuck off." Montieth then sears the ears with a rooftop rain-synth patch before undergoing a loose groove by brushed snare and conga, in tosses visages of a melody back and forth as if debating itself.
"Little Town of Bethlehem" also addresses Middle East politics with an excerpt from an interview of a Palestinian woman recalling the violent entry of an Israeli-Jewish settlement near her town. It's followed by a mournful, minor-key piano ballad with a bassline brooding in the distance, avoiding any crescendo or climax in continuing to walk and mind its own business. Montieth better translated his anxieties and hopes for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Wild Life, on which his sparse rhythms and desolate atmospherics all seemed to view Israeli streets through a police night-vision camera. Opener "Slow Rot from Rhetoric" solidifies the album's sense of exhausted dreams with a inching, death march beat and organ melodies that veer through the stereo speakers like hallucinated angels waiting for souls to leave the earth.
For the most part, Montieth's rhythms thankfully break away from his live, but auto-piloted grooves and dwells in post-Timbaland ethno-hop territory. Flamenco rhythms curl the beat and Athesia's crooned French syllables on "Port-Au-Prince", while they jolt the bones on the uptempo jaunt "Texas Tea". On "Rock of Ages", Montieth liquidates a splashing hi-hat on an otherwise generic dub number.
Closer "Habitat for Heavy Hearts" has Montieth superimposing a field recording of crickets over synth drones ladled from the ether. By the album's end, it is unclear if he was in a "new world" to begin with, given that he generally keeps his music within the same formula of brooding and digitally smeared dub since 2002. One might consider New World Observer as the blues for a homeless soul in a world distorted by mass media. If anything, Montieth seems to be one of those angels following the death march; taking the hand of fallen souls to another place that has one question a previous life on earth more than celebrate its escape from it.
