It's easy to get lost in the sea of ink around dubstep. It goes back to UK garage, which goes back to drum'n'bass, which goes back to house, techno, hip hop, and reggae. A DJ can play four-on-the-floor kicks, thudding half-speed beats, double-time breakbeats, Southern hip-hop 808 beats, dubby bass lines, heavy metal-ish distorted synths, Detroit techno chord stabs, and blissed-out atmospheric washes, and it can all be considered dubstep. Critics love this. Ergo, acres of blog posts and lifetimes of DJ mixes waxing academic about dubstep's sub-sub-strains. Writing and music and dancing and architecture have never been more conflated.
For all the talk of dubstep as future music, it is stubbornly recombinant. Dubstep is filled with drum'n'bass sounds from the last decade. Burial, dubstep's big crossover success, was/is essentially house producer Todd Edwards through a druggy haze. Many tout Clubroot, a UK producer, as the next Burial. This is true in that his debut album is not a bunch of disposable DJ singles, but rather a coherent statement suited for home listening. But it's false in that Clubroot sounds quite different. Unlike Burial, he uses vocals sparingly. When he does, they are textures and hardly recognizable as vocals. This goes about things the hard way-- people (especially critics) love vocals-- but it goes further. A sad song feels sadder if it doesn't tell you that it's sad. This album is not future music. It is one of the saddest things you'll ever hear. Its tears come now, not later.
This album has actually been made before. In 2003, English breaks producer Tipper released an album called Surrounded. It set cavernous bass and desolate textures atop low-impact hip hop beats. This sound was once called trip-hop; Massive Attack's 100th Window was comparable in its digital isolation. Clubroot's album is similar, though it has traits that will date it as a product of 2009 -- some gently swung garage here, some half-time dubstep there.
Like much of dubstep, this record makes for a fun game of "spot the influence." The spacey atmospherics of "Birth Interlude" harken back to the heyday of LTJ Bukem's Good Looking Records. The bleary dystopia of "Nexus" recalls neurofunk drum'n'bass like Hidden Agenda and Ed Rush & Optical. "Lucid Dream" and "Sempiternal" feature languid drum'n'bass two-step beats and hoover bass lines. But for all its influences, this record is remarkably singular. Its sounds coalesce into a feeling for which words would do injustice. Perhaps it's fatigue; after drum'n'bass' aggression has spent itself, it rolls back its frequencies and rumbles quietly and alone. Perhaps it's wistfulness; all these fog horns and bird calls and musty washes are memories from dancefloors past. Perhaps it's loneliness; after a lifetime of information processing, which in today's Internet age can take but months, one yearns to go outside and meet a fellow soul.
