Benjy Keating started making music in a South London bedroom, spurred on by his roommate Dominik Dvorak (aka PC Music affiliated producer Felicita). At first he was making what he admitted to be “Burial rip-offs” but then, after hearing dancehall beats blare out of car windows, he drifted into a new style. The first taste of this came with a song called “Catch,” made in conjunction with SOPHIE. The song boasted a cool minimalism grafted onto the whisper of polyrhythmic Caribbean sounds. On top of it was Keating’s voice: British, introverted, mumbly, a painfully shy-sounding white kid singing in a sort of patois. It was hard to know what to make of it, but there was an undeniable magnetism to it: Why make a totally introverted, melancholic, and skeletal brand of dancehall? There's an argument that it could maybe work: His current labelmate Popcaan proved in 2014’s Where We Come From that without a doubt, the voice behind a mic in dancehall wasn’t the providence of the badman exclusively.
It’s taken six years of behind-the-scenes work and training for Keating to release a full-length debut. He’s produced and written every second of the 36 minutes of *PAGAN. *He’s signed to Dre Skull’s acclaimed independent dancehall label Mixpak, has co-signs from PC Music producers, is featured favorably in respected magazines that span avant-garde art (DIS) and music (FACT, Fader, and others). In other words, he's enjoyed a light smattering of hype. The adjectives that seem to orbit around him—dreamy, romantic, intimate—aren’t necessarily wrong, but they don’t exactly say why he should be interesting. If anything, on a purely musical level, the 36 minutes that compose *PAGAN, *constitutes a bewilderingly long and shapeless journey into the heart of a sound that is truly lacking in depth.
Keating seems driven to explore how dancehall and soca rhythms might work in a vacuum. In PAGAN, he solely relies on looped synths, subdued drum machines, and the occasional sample, boiling down cultural signifiers so that only the essential components of those genre’s polyrhythmic patterns are recognizable. He then injects pop straight into the minimalism, making sure the selected synth loop twinkles nicely, and the drum beats happily shuffle. In the tiniest of doses, it can sound attractive but prolonged exposure (read: more than four or five minutes) is both irritating and bewildering. The songs themselves are so muddled, amorphous and repetitive that they become indistinguishable. It’s hard to know what the music is striving to make you feel, if anything: excitement is clearly not the goal, but modest DIY stuff is usually supposed to be fresh and wide-eyed, not clinical and sleepy. And “sleepy” is probably something dancehall should never be. In the brief instrumental interludes, like “Reekin” and “Comeragh Mountains” you can feel the limitations built into the very idea of making dancehall rhythms melancholic or atmospheric present themselves.
Then there are those vocals. It’s not necessarily insulting or offensive that Keating sings in a clunky patois. But it is mystifying that he chooses to deliver it in a lilting, high-pitched stage whisper. His lyrics are usually garbled, but when you do catch his words they’re throwaway statements about the modern condition (“I'm lost in the c/there's no remedy”) or generalized hot nonsense, like this one from “Beamer”: “Let the beat drop all night going back to back/back to back/slit my tummy good make a diamond suit.” Lyrics can be nonsense, of course, but a talented vocalist would make them bounce: Keating dashes through these ridiculous lines like a terrified kid reading at a middle school podium, elongating his delivery at strange sections and pitch-shifting his voice in arbitrary and irritating ways. Even in his most coherent song, “Club Aso,” his singing somehow comes off like a Chris Martin approximation of dancehall.
Keating has been quick to point out on Twitter that his relationship with dancehall is a tad more opaque and complicated than it might seem, writing back in May: “Just to clarify dancehall never died n also i don't make dancehall.” And then later in an interview with the *Fader *he said “I don’t make dancehall...Dancehall’s so pure as it is, it doesn’t need me to add anything to it."In both of these statements, it’s obvious that he’s grappling with the complications of his particular choices, but there is a certain quality of what he’s saying that feels half-hearted. It’s a rote statement of cultural sensitivity that doesn’t address the fact that his singing and cribbing of rhythms are at best poor impressions of nuanced and complicated linguistic and musical vernaculars. He name-checks the likes of Vybz Kartel and Alkaline as influences, when in a very real way he shares nothing with what they’re doing, considering his general attitude and actual sound. Overall, it’s hard to see where his strengths are, and on some deeper level, I can’t imagine a situation where listening to this album is appropriate for anything else but falling asleep at your desk.
