Hugh Jones’ debut album as Crewdson, for the Slowfoot label, joins the dots between the pointillist percussive post-dubstep textures of Mount Kimbie and James Blake, Matthew Herbert’s late 90s work as Dr Rockit or Wishmountain, a hint of the wonky world of Scandinavian Skwee, plus the loping Los Angeles sounds of Samiyam and the retro-fetishism of DaM FunK. To my mind, the Crewdson moniker sounds as if he should be making lowest-common denominator wobblestep for pre-pubescent ravers, rather than the heady, and sometimes overly dense, montage of modern production techniques overlayed with the odd soulful jazzy interlude. “Electric Wing” brings that Herbertified soul to the fore (not surprisingly Hugh worked as an technical assistant on Herbert’s 2010 effort One Club) as swinging horns and wonky beats fold and twist. Album opener, ‘Starting Out on the Wrong Foot’s reminds me of an orchestra of Ompa Loompas reinterpreting the works of Autechre with a curious warped syntax of chirruping rhythms and a disrupted robotic funk.
The shimmery glockenspiels and glacial synths of “Dust Crawlers” make a second-wave Detroit connection to these ears. Crewdson then artfully layers a staggering (in both senses) post-garage rhythm, and tops it off with plaintive cut-up vocals, adding a human edge to this machine music for the spheres. “Cascade” finds the right mix between mind-boggling beat production and atmosphere, with its brooding, yet hopeful, shimmery cascade. Here, Crewdson mixes Boards of Canada-style diced vocals with a computer orchestra of one reinterpreting Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. My one criticism of Gravity lies within Crewdson’s obviously high production skills, these occasionally get in the way of a rollicking good beat, as he twists and tweaks it out of shape before the mind has grasped it completely. No such complaint raises its head on ‘Full Force Shuffle’ as Sino-synths and handclaps wooze and pulse their way through the last ten years of beat deconstruction, and mix in some improv-jazz-guitar noodlings to boot. Heading in five directions at once, Crewdson, Gravity establishes Hugh Jones as a beatsmith on par with any of his contemporaries mining the fertile soil around the edges of modern soul, dubstep and esoteric electronica.
Oliver Laing
