“This song’s about killing yourself, this song’s about depression, the women who leave. The car has no brakes and we’re flooring it. We’re gonna hit something – so what…”
A terse voice spitting out these words opens ‘No Brakes’, the first track on Valentine. With sampled/cut-up female vocals and gloomy piano, this almost sounds like a bad trip version of Moby.
Cdatakill is one Zak Roberts, a breakcore producer comin’ atcha from Denver, Colorado, and Valentine is his third full-length album. However he seems to be mining a different seam from breakcore here – this album is heavy, dubbed-up, industrial and moody. His stated goal is: “to pin opposites together, to bring sounds that normally oppose and conflict with each other into a seamless aural nightmare and daydream, to expose and glorify the beautiful alongside the violent.”
‘Yesterdays’ samples an old Billie Holliday song, framing the ghostly vocal samples in a paranoid atmosphere of sickening distorted beats and bowel-loosening bass pulses. I don’t think we’re in Jazzland anymore, Toto… A weird, sampled Middle Eastern-sounding woodwind melody snakes its way through the dark spaces of ‘Nefertiti Dub’, punctuated by violent, thick metal guitar stabs – this one wouldn’t sound out of place on Massive Attack’s Mezzanine.
Several tracks on this CD could cause serious damage on the dancefloors of those clubs whose patrons like their tunes dubby, dread-filled, queasy and fucked-up.
Some MP3s from this release are available for free download at http://www.adnoiseam.net/label/catalog/73/enter.htm.
Ewan Burke
