The debut full-length from UK producer SBTRKT comes as a bit of a surprise. Up until now we knew him mostly for some high-profile remixes and his original, instrumental tracks, which were solid but nothing to flip out over. He was loosely dubstep in the way, say, Floating Points is, using the genre as a rough guide but also weaving in several other strains of contemporary bass music. But with this self-titled LP, SBTRKT is something different: Recruiting guest vocalists to sing over his arrangements, he's working more as a traditional producer, and his music, while still grounded in experimental bass, is inching much closer toward pop.
You might call what SBTRKT is doing here "post-dubstep". That's not a totally accurate term (for one, he's building off more than just that one genre), but his approach is certainly similar to what guys like James Blake and Jamie Woon have been up to in the last year or so. The central differences here are that a) SBTRKT doesn't sing himself (he's brought in vocalists Sampha, Jessie Ware, Roses Gabor, and Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano for that); and b) his music is more immediate than both Blake's and Woon's. Rather than go for showy, scene-stealing productions, he keeps things tight and purposeful: The focus is on the overall song and the vocal, and beats are just one part of that equation.
The record pits some emotive and occasionally downcast singing against arrangements that throb nicely, and there's a good sense of balance and variety throughout. First single "Wildfire", for example, is a squelchy, Timbaland-like pop moment, where "Trials of the Past" is spooky and slower-paced. The reason the tracks work individually and as a whole is that SBTRKT has a keen sense of how to draw the most out of his guest vocalists. UK singer Sampha, who is featured heavily on the LP, has a warm, higher-range croon that seems built for R&B, and SBTRKT arranges accordingly, giving him stuttery tracks that draw from American urban pop and smoothed-out drum'n'bass.
Importantly this makes the album greater than the sum of its parts. "Dubstep dude with a bunch of singers" becomes something much more collaborative and cohesive. SBTRKT is ultimately a colorful and highly enjoyable future-pop record, an extension of bass culture but not indebted to it. The other crucial thing is that the album is actually quite accessible, which is something that's eluded similar post-bass projects. Those other guys-- Blake, Woon-- might have a purer artistic vision, but of the three, SBTRKT has arguably assembled the broadest and most listenable collection of songs. And in a field where approachability isn't always given a ton of weight, it feels brave to take this more song-oriented path and pull it off.
