Various - The World is Gone

esoter1c · #1 (**permalink**) Nov 26, 06

For about four years I've been looking for someone to validate the promise of dubstep, underneath all the fan rhetoric and half-awesome records. In The World Is Gone, I've finally found it. Admittedly this is like saying you've been looking for a record to validate the promise you hear in hip-hop and found in it Endtroducing. But hey, you can't pick your friends. Dubstep, if you don't read Martin Clark's "Month In" column or have an unhealthy addiction to British online record stores, is an offshoot of UK garage that, as the name might imply, foregrounds the bass-- really foregrounds the bass. So much so that a lot of dubstep records, great as they are, are useless on your iPod. And while this year has seen a slate of dubstep albums-- Burial, Boxcutter, Kode9-- that you and your cat can enjoy while doing the dishes in your studio apartment, The World Is Gone tops them all. This is mostly because it pushes the genre out of the club's doors and as far from the dancefloor as possible while still being, you know, dubstep. (Though some fans might argue that it's not. They can tell it to the marines. Or whatever the British equivalent of marines are.)
On his blog, critic Simon Reynolds said that the Various record is "impossible to describe without it sounding a bit wank, really." He's right. "Dubstep plus folk," which is the Various Production aesthetic writ at its most micro-blurb basic, does sound like the worst thing ever-- even if it's more accurately described as "dubstep plus breathy female chick vocals," which puts it in a much longer and less unique continuum of electronic dance records (though no worse for it). When trying to describe it to a friend, the light finally went off: "Portishead 2K6." (And judging by the advance press the album has gotten, my great Portishead revelation wasn't as unique as I thought. Pitchfork's Amy Phillips invoked the Bristol trio when the album was announced on this very site's news section a few months ago. For all I know it's in the press release, but you should always toss those things.)
And though I was joking about the Portishead thing, it's only partially off the mark. Just like Portishead pouring Beth Gibbons' sour times croon over the shy, midtempo hip-hop beats that were all the rage in the mid 90s, Various take the thump-thump-thump that's defined the sound of urban Britain in the early part of this decade and gives it what it's always been looking for: estrogen. For a genre (garage) that was so girly, its offshoots (dubstep and grime) are fulla boy's cooties. I can't count the number of times that I've listened to a dubstep track and thought this is pretty great, but the simple addition of the human female voice would make it a masterpiece. But rather than the shrill blasts of sexed-up, coke-nosed r&b that wobbled on top of turn-of-the-millennium garage tracks, Various' voices are positively morose.
But The World Is Gone certainly won't make it into as many dinner party selections as Dummy did, which means that it won't become a record that screams "mid-00s!" in a decade. That also probably means it won't spawn a million terrible imitators. The reason is the beats, which snarl and boom or wibble and groan rather than creep and snap. "Hater" is "Jigga What, Jigga Who" run through the cheap-sounding reverb filter on my old 16-bit copy of Sound Forge. But the vocal at least leavens the hollow, metallic din, whereas a traditional dubstep track would have thrust the ugly, synthetic bassline in your ear.
Other songs on The World Is Gone aren't so forgiving. The title track is the darkest end of rave, complete with synth stabs that could shear the roof off a barn. "Thunkk" bites some Bernard Herrmann/Psycho strings and adds a monologue somewhere between beat poetry and the paranoid shortwave radio ramblings of the radical/lunatic fringe, while "Lost" blows a snarl of sooty, ugly noise in your ear as male screams and howls drown in the dust cloud. If this is trip-hop, it's the kind of trip where you wake up without a shirt on, covered in tree sap, and vowing to swear off hallucinogens this time for good.
But "Fly", the final track, does away with beats and horrible noise entirely for the kind of synthetic-acoustic dark folk that's had reviewers reaching for the not quite right Anne Briggs or Shirley Collins comparisons. More than anything, The World Is Gone is the year's best goth record since Silent Shout, and with Halloween just around the corner and the leaves quickly being stripped from the trees by wicked winds, you can bet this is going to get ample headphone play while you're rushing through the city, bundled up against the cold.
And finally, I've got to mention the packaging. Various first appeared on the scene a year or two ago with a run of super limited edition 7" and 12" singles, all draped in the same gorgeous, pointillist ink drawings-- Alphonse Mucha meets Tim Burton meets Patrick Nagel-- with absolutely nothing in the way of artist info. Various have, thankfully, (sorta) resisted the urge to turn that anonymity into a marketing hook. And though the drawings are somewhat less beguiling shrunk down to fit a CD booklet and stuck behind plastic, the strange world Various' music and art calls up-- stark, grayscale, and full of beautiful, sad women and strange animal couplings-- has remained intact, available now to those without a turntable or a heavy amount of Boomkat credit card debt.

-Jess Harvell, October 26, 2006

It's on SLSK not Lamewire.

http://www.emusic.com/album/10939/10939557.html

Check out "Don't ask" and "Hater", wicked wicked tunes.