Review Summary: shallow yet life-affirming, foot-stomping, ass-shaking, and worry-liberating
Hey, you wanna shake your ass and stomp your feet? Cool.
Oh, there's one dude that's pretty good at making music that can create these two physical activities: Fred Again. The English DJ can bring together communities that only speak to each other when waiting for their drug dealer: EDM and indietronica fans. To the former, Fred Gibson offers thicc drops; to the latter beautiful melodies that speak to their pop sensibilities. He actually made this incongruous association this summer in New York by inviting Swedish House Mafia and Four Tet to perform together. This ain't the only notable thing he did recently: in the past two years, the DJ released two solo albums, produced a whole record for drill spitta Headie One, worked with BTS, Stormzy, and Future, and, most importantly, performed during a boiler room that blazed the 2022 summer almost as efficiently as climate change.
Said boiler room was impressive because of the communicative energy Gibson poured in: laughing, playing with the audience, having fun with his drumkit, all made for a London audience that was authentically boiling - which is a nice change from the usual Instagram-posting posers that you usually encounter in such circumstances. With this resounding success, the third episode of his
Actual Life series was the most anticipated. For context, The trilogy
kinda acts as a personal diary, collaging voice notes from friends or Instagram strangers on top of garage beats, breaks, and house licks. The end goal is evident: to create celebratory music that still offers deep peeks into its author's mind. Cool! Does he actually pull it off? Eh, kind of.
In any case,
Actual Life 3 brings out everything missing
and amazing with the Englishman's albums. First, compared to the blastin' euphoria characterizing this summer's boiler room,
Actual Life 3 pales. That's because Fred Again exhibits a work rate that tends to be counter-productive: trimming down the output and releasing one overall excellent record instead of three cool yet uneven albums in eighteen months would have done the trick. If absolute bangers like "Delilah (pull me out of this)", "Danielle (smile on my face)", or "Clara (the night is dark)" indicate the DJ's capacity to melt a dancefloor, the mellower tunes likewise prove he's much less at ease when it comes to writing ambient songs. That had to be expected because he's a DJ known for leg-convulsing antics, not for bittersweet songwriting.
The other major problem of this third installment is its positioning as a personal diary. Like Will Bevan in his one-two classic
Burial and
Untrue, pitched vocal samples are present to leverage emotional response. Still, the overreliance on these samples ends up expressing very few emotionally concrete ideas. Not unlike the new BeReal craze, Gibson's albums represent the sonic feeling of scrolling through someone's social media posts. These vocal snippets help to have a glimpse of what the person is about, but they are way too surface-level to properly indicate whatever demon is haunting them - something Burial effectively pulled out with his early material.
Nevertheless, this is, first and foremost, a dance record. Diving into the psyche of its author is insignificant in the grand scheme of dancey things - a theme Gibson imposed on himself without properly sticking to it, yes, but one that ultimately weighs little compared to the joy provided by the most banging tunes. So when Fred Again.. does focus on creating bouncy-ass dance music, it's everything you could wish for: it's life-affirming, foot-stomping, ass-shaking, and worry-liberating.
