With so much of dubstep these days venturing into formulaic territory, its very refreshing when you stumble across something out of the ordinary, and while many dubstep artists struggle with the album concept, a coherent journey where the track sequence and flow are as important as the music contained, Kryptic Minds seemed to have mastered the art. There is always an obvious comparison with emerging dubstep artists, but its not always a bad thing, its not always accusations of being a copyist. The obvious comparison I have to make here is that Kryptic Minds does remind me of Sam Shackleton’ output, and I think that is a great complement, as Shackleton is one of the few that are pushing boundaries, and exploring new territory.
Kryptic Minds have approached their song craft with minimalism, stripping the sounds to their bare bones, allowing each sound to be surrounded by space, making for crisp skanking rhythms, minus the middle eastern influence of Shackleton, except for “Stepping Stone†where eastern percussion is prominent. The other refreshing thing to note is the absence of the over used “wobble bass’ sound current in so much of the dubstep staple, instead Kryptic Minds weaves intricate and often subtle bass lines that carry the tracks, but do become prominent if played on a good sound system at volume, with a decent sub woofer. This approach makes most tracks on One Of Us fantastic fodder for club sound systems, good home stereo’, but maybe not so good for the mp3 age of compressed data and poor performance headphones.
An impressive debut for Kryptic Minds, that back up the powerful 12†releases and the few remixes to their name, they’ve left themselves plenty of space in their music to develop their sound over time, and may just be the dubstep act to watch for 2010. Highly recommended.
Wayne Stronell
