Review Summary: A very real and very haunting response to a loss, and another landmark release for the elusive Zomby
Enigmatic and eccentric dubstep producer Zomby is an artist fully aware and respectful of the power of memory. His music is steeped in remembrance, of times and places that gave birth to the maturity found lurking in his work. Of music and artists who found their trail-blazing antics swallowed whole by Zomby’s insatiable thirst for knowledge and experience. Musicians and producers who unknowingly shaped and molded Zomby into the musical intellect who now stands front and center as the titular figurehead of the whole “wonky” movement, a specific sound that evolved out of J Dilla’s melancholic hip hop only to be slowly dissolved by the battery acid of Flying Lotus and the seminal Brainfeeder label. It’s a musical crossroads of sorts, with the molten synth of yesteryear rave slowly being assimilated into glitchy bouts of dragging hip hop flow and the cavernous rumble that’s become the soundtrack for the grey skies of South London. Which provides us with the perfect description for Zomby’s acclaimed debut effort,
Where Were U In ’92?. An ode to a past bejeweled with stabbing breakbeats and trance-like naivety, the album represented a brighter point in a world that has slowly been eaten alive by teeth chattering bass and ghost like lamentations, all decked out in 8-bit like glory.
Dedication follows a similar premise of longing and subsequently having to let go. But what was once a fond look back has since been replaced with a very real and deep sense of loss and regret. There’s an unmistakable feeling of something so precious and familiar now gone, departed in whatever way but in no way able to return. Perhaps something that always remained unattainable, or maybe an object or person that was well within reach. Something to have been held that has since turned to dust, leaving only the vital remnants of times spent connected behind. As such, Zomby turns his sophomore effort into an epitaph, a constantly jilted and stammering body of work that serves as a shrine for that vital missing object. So it’s no small coincidence that he couples the aptly named ‘Witch Hunt’ with ‘Natalia’s Song’. Both heady with their dreamy aesthetics and somber undercurrents they play out like a struggle and subsequent assault before dipping into the swan song for the apparent condemned. With the subtle strains of Irina Dubtzova being wistfully strung into the patchwork, ‘Nat’s Song’ sings out as a prayer for the persecuted, a cry and ultimately, a declaration, of eternal remembrance.
At a staggering 16 tracks,
Dedication is at face value a daunting task. But Zomby knows more than most about the value of not out-staying his welcome. Few tracks cross the three minute marker, with more than a few numbers on offer barely straying outside of mere interlude territory. This harkens to Zomby’s restless persona, a man always in the studio even when he’s away from home. Notebooks are filled to the brim with ideas and notes, blurry thoughts which resemble bleary-eyed early morning confusion. As a result his tracks play out exactly like you would imagine them to: they arrive and play out their choreographed routine before reluctantly giving up the spotlight to the next performance. Ideas are scribbled down before being scrunched up and discarded in favor of new directions; songs end on a whim, sometimes they integrate seamlessly back and forth, other times drastically being cut in half by the sounds of a discharging gun. Such is the case with the first single, the Panda Bear-assisted ‘Things Fall Apart’. Noah tries in earnest to anchor
Dedication for as long as he possibly can with his drugged out vocals slowly unfurling over the fragile beat; its source of inspiration a number of overlooked 70’s sci-fi specials.
This hasty “discard and re-apply” approach represents the only true flaw with this new body of work. With so much in the air with this album, so much untold exposition and motivations etched into the framework, the constant and sometimes fickle nature with which he destroys his creations allows for only a limited amount of breathing room, only the tiniest of windows in which to familiarize yourself with. There’s no emotional payout here; Zomby chooses to ignore the easy way out by cutting short any chance to invest any kind of understanding or sympathy. There’s no apology or any apparent want for forgiveness, there’s no catharsis or sense of needing a release. Whether he feels he doesn’t need it or perhaps because he feels that he doesn’t deserve it is still up in the air, but to make the connection between the sudden and obvious loss and the apparent need to leave things unfinished makes for a rather intriguing dichotomy.
Zomby’s sophomore effort shows the producer playing up to strengths no one could have seen him capable of achieving. He drops the immediacy and fluency of his earlier self and focuses his talents on crafting something much more subtle and indelible. Tracks like ‘A Devil Lay Here’ with its borderline-like jazzy noir feel to it, and ‘Basquait’ reveal a much more reflective and focused artist, more cerebral and serene than overly insistent. He never strays too far from his roots though as ‘Alothea’ rides high on its insistent 2-step and bubbling liquid synths, and ‘Black Orchid’ pulls back the covers on his lifelong addiction for 8-bit; for just over a minute does he turn the soundtrack to any nondescript Nintendo dungeon into a veritable torrent of cascading keys, constantly churning out their chiptune. There’s something incredibly sinister in the way he does this though, as if in the conversion he’s retained the dragons and hidden them behind the neon curtain.
In many ways though,
Dedication isn’t all that far removed from his attempts at resurrecting the early 90’s. His acid rave has merely been dissected and chopped up into various bits and bytes and reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle, just pieced together deliberately out of sequence. And yet, all the pieces still fit. And with that completed yet skewed picture we get another masterpiece for the year, from an artist constantly overlooked yet more than equipped at conquering the world at the drop of a hat. So painfully close to classic status as to inspire frustration, the only thing holding it back is when you realize what the album could have been if just a few more of his ideas had been nurtured to full term.
