Machinedrum existed long before Room(s): dig back a bit and you'll find a lot of dizzying glitch-hop and IDM moves on releases like 2001's Now You Know and 2002's Urban Biology that still reverberate through his more contemporary work. That Travis Stewart has since moved from Four Tet-shadowed downtempo abstraction to triple-digit BPMs and retro junglist breaks doesn't change things too much, either. Always handy with muted, distorted droning chords and shredded flakes of melody, Machinedrum's breakthrough as an in-demand name in bass music is a logical destination in the long run; all that there was left to wait for was a context.
That context is getting pretty familiar-- distant, lonely vocal refrains from the Burial playbook glazed over a rhythm that could be shorthanded as juke'n'bass. If Room(s) set the stage, and his work with Praveen Sharma as Sepalcure expanded the palette, Vapor City finds Machinedrum getting comfortable inside the parameters that juiced his reptuation. But he's made that formula effective enough that the visceral, emotional lift hasn't faded any. The early signs were there with key single “Gunshotta”: snare-kick fusillades shivering like they have hypothermia, flourescent synthesizer chords reflecting off wet pavement, tunnel-echo fragments of deep soul singing that are so distressed they harmonize cleanly with ruffneck ragga vocals. It's practically archetypal at this point. It's also straight-up gorgeous.
Vapor City is front-loaded with those kinds of moments. Part of the thrill of listening to “Infinite Us” is hearing those yearning piano notes that open it and wondering how they'll be put through the wringer; the slow build to a huge, gleaming ascension on the back of a harplike guitar arpeggio only heightens the pull between the delicate melodies and the full-steam-ahead percussion. For a while, it feels like there are endless ways for him to shadowbox the rhythm. “Don't 1 2 Lose U” puts every note of its percussive synthesizer riff through a slight flange effect that, coupled with the wavering vocal sample that gives it its title, makes it sound like the downpour 808s are rattling a film soundtrack off the spools. And opening “Center Your Love” with a gradual un-muffling of its airy dream-pop vocal-driven riff is a slow focus into euphoria; its deep, spare set of piano/guitar chords are a vivid setup for the best Boards of Canada loop Boards of Canada never made.
The novelty doesn't come across as strongly on the album's latter half-- after an early peak, Vapor City plays all its hands and settles into a more stripped-down stretch to the end. While it's more likely to feel like acclimation than pointless wheel-spinning stasis, it also has the air of the almost-complete to it, like these sparser tracks are waiting for a vocalist to complete it a'la “SXLND” becoming the backbone for Azealia Banks' “NEEDSUMLUV”. Put the demarcation line at “Vizion”, a submerged descent into crumbling ambient, and everything afterwards is merely deep-cut solid. There are bigger disappointments than this, granted-- the worst you can say about the second half of Vapor City is that it's something of a weird choice to sequence two consecutive tracks with “lie” so prominent in the vocal hook (the downtempo Italians Do It Better-adjacent synthpop of “U Still Lie” and the hyperventilating footwork of “Eyesdontlie”). It could just be a matter of volume, really. When you crank this album loud, it's not just the beats that rattle the system, though they're as crisply forceful as ever. It's the intricate musical subtleties Stewart weaves through them that blow your hair back.
