Magnetic Man

Alright let's give this its own thread.

"yeah, in the 90s you had tons of alt acts/acts emerging from the dance underground who actually shifted units and got in the charts, like matt says; and it's easy to see who their equivalents are now, but...without the units and chart placings. (then again were massive attack, tricky et al ever known for their touring schedules like most bands now are?)

Dude, MAGNETIC MAN. That album is the exact equivalent of a Blue Lines/Leftism/Dig Your Own Hole.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 7 October 2010 10:44 (1 hour ago) Permalink

is that magnetic man record worth checking btw?

― http://tinypic.com/r/s0wvar/7 (a hoy hoy), Thursday, 7 October 2010 11:44 (42 minutes ago) Permalink

It's pretty good, and I say this as a dubstep hater. Probably deserves its own thread.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 7 October 2010 11:53 (33 minutes ago) Permalink

Probably deserves its own thread.

let's not go overboard.

― Tim F, Thursday, 7 October 2010 12:03 (23 minutes ago) Permalink

i haven't heard the full magnetic man album, the sampler was only ok. the next single, the katy b one, is really good but...it's drum'n'bass!

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Thursday, 7 October 2010 12:15 (11 minutes ago) Permalink

It's proper 90s style rave pop really.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 7 October 2010 12:20 (6 minutes ago) Permalink

Both the Katy B tunes on the album are really good actually. But you're wading through a fair bit of boring stuff there.

― Tim F, Thursday, 7 October 2010 12:23 (3 minutes ago) Permalink

I like them both better than Katy On A Mission. Still, it's going to be pretty big in the UK, the sort of crossover dance record that Britain hasn't really had since the 90s.

I say dance, but with the exception of Perfect Stranger none of it made me want to dance at all.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 7 October 2010 12:26 (47 seconds ago) Permalink"

Incidentally all the best bits are the non-dubstep tracks. It prompted me to go and listen to the Skream album from earlier this year which really IS boring.

I'm going to listen to it this afternoon as I clean.

I will say this though: Katy On a Mission>Perfect Stranger

xpost - that Skream album's grown on me quite a bit actually.

I feel like a disgusting turncoat traitor for starting this thread btw.

Is there any less poppy dubstep you like, Matt?

I like yer Jokers/Guidos/Ikonikas and so forth, but I suppose they don't really count. I generally think it fails as dance music and gets disproportionate fawning praise.

Lots of dubstep I regard more as bedroom music than clubbing music.

On track four. The synths are a bit trancey for my taste.

Ooo, I like this one (The Bug).

Matt DC - never knew you were a dubstep hata!

This was a'ight, good cleaning music as I expected. Definitely more and better hooks than the Skream solo effort, and heavier in places too. Will listen again.

I've not heard this yet, but I've got horrible visions of some sort of dubstep version of Supermayer or Major Lazer. Dance superherogroups have always fallen a bit short for me.

Skream solo album was kind of dump. Not awful, but not great - just, well it's the sound of the middle-period dubstep bastion running into commercial ground and running out of ideas too. Quite a few heads who I know liked it though. Isn't Rusko supposed to be producing a Madonna album soon or something??!

Please tell me you made that up about Rusko/Madonna. It wouldn't remotely surprise me though.

Maybe not Madonna. A very famous American female artist though. Christina maybe? It's definitely happening.

it's britney

xpost Wiki reckons it's either Rihanna or Britney. Either way it's pretty o_O

just realised i never did listen to that skream album either! i can't envisage it being as good as his debut.

i actually quite like the idea of dubstep as a strictly commercial thing - rusko's album was unlistenable but i'm looking forward to seeing what he'll do with britney. i don't really find dubstep to be a worthwhile underground dance thing any more (not that i was ever a FAN of it) - at least the stuff that self-identifies as dubstep, anyway.

britney's already done a dubstep tune anyway. and rihanna's already done a quasi-dubstep album! so not remotely o_0

I do quite like the new Skream, but it's generally unremarkable. Certainly not as good as his debut or the EPs. Also be warned Lex, it has La Roux on.

^^ah yes that would be why i couldn't bring myself to listen to it

britney's already done a dubstep tune anyway

I'm pretty sure that, despite the whole of Dissensus wetting themselves over Freakshow, any similarity between those opening bars and any dubstep was purely coincidental. Fucking dubstep dudes thinking they invented rumbling base and 'bwaarp' noises.

Hers is actually one of the better tracks imo (xpost)

Fucking dubstep dudes thinking they invented rumbling base and 'bwaarp' noises.

Yep - seems that anything with (or optionally without) a big bassline and a particular kind of beat pallette is labeled as dubstep influenced these days, which may or may not be correct. I guess it's just these days' equivalent of electro a few years back - just the go-to trendy sound du jour.

I say "optionally without" because, well listen to the Darkstar album...

Direct analogy with all the OMG Timbaland

[grrr enter key] -doing-drum-and-bass excitement in the late 90s. Similarly misplaced/coincidental.

I'm pretty sure that, despite the whole of Dissensus wetting themselves over Freakshow, any similarity between those opening bars and any dubstep was purely coincidental. Fucking dubstep dudes thinking they invented rumbling base and 'bwaarp' noises.

Ha, I love this. Dubstep evangelists are such a pain in the neck - takes me right back to the more joyless elements of dance music journalism in the 90s.

One reason I love ILM is minimal discussion of the hardcore continuum.

ilm is really weird in that i often get cast as/find myself in the role of dubstep defender when i never fucking liked it in the first place, and only loved stuff vaguely attached to it when it stopped being dubstep (=>night slugs house elements or =>rihanna/katy b turning it into pop)

is this out yet? I, for one, am keen to find out if this is just Annie Mac fodder or really good. The singles don't do a great deal for me, a bit 'focused grouped' maybe. As Arthur Smith is the man here I'd want something this good;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5kz4JECAxQ&feature=related

have never really understood the big dealio about 'red' and how it's accumulated this seminal rep.

also how on earth can it be dubstep when i own the 12? like duh.

I'm not saying it is, it seemed to go down well with broken beat scene from what I recall. Connection is; Arthur Smith = Big Apple, Croydon = early dubstep as far as I'm aware. Red EP a classic imho.

awwww yeah dubstep reprazent

see what i did there

this won't be nom'd for mercury prize, tho

ilm is really weird in that i often get cast as/find myself in the role of dubstep defender when i never fucking liked it in the first place

Oh come on, you have repped for dubstep on MANY occasions, admittedly having initially dismissed it as boring.This is Liberal Democrat level revisionist history.

awwww yeah dubstep reprazent

Maybe halfway between that and being the dubstep equiv. of the Shy FX & T-Power album.

Surely that's exactly what dubstep needed?

what was that shy fx track with the ragga toasting? that shot was amazing.

i find the idea of a pop vocal dubstep album utterly contemptible. dubstep is a false, pale, flabby, degenerate form of dance music whose legacy will be measured only by its impact on True Techno Music. much like microhouse before it, except with a different set of early adopters. (usual suspects excepted, though imo the connection to 2step and grime is much overstated)

i find the idea of a pop vocal dubstep album utterly contemptible.

Not contemptible, just self-defeating: dubstep works as a structural basis for dance-pop only by reducing it to its most simplistic form (basic halfstep beat with no internal kinetics, just a kind of exhausted dogged loping feel + bass farts... i.e. Benga basically) and then adding familiar elements on top (trance chords).

dubstep is a false, pale, flabby, degenerate form of dance music whose legacy will be measured only by its impact on True Techno Music.

This is parody surely vahid?

basically just think of me as a sock

i mean the style is intentionally OTT though it's my honest opinion that the "dutch sound" and the berghain/hardwax endorsed stuff is about the best dubstep has to offer.

but yeah from this point on moonship is moonship's sock

BTW tim there is one track that does what you describe to astonishing, transcendent effect and that is caspa's remix of deadmau5 and kaskade

Re whether a dubstep equiv of Shy FX and T-Power is "what dubstep neeeded"...

I guess "proper" dubstep is basically in the same position now that d&b was in 2000-2002. I was going out to d&b nights in 2000 and thought stuff like the original version of Kosheen's "Hide U" was A Good Thing, not improving the prevailing, overly simplistic and generic beat structure but at least (a) distracting from it, and (b) rendering it more purposeful, insofar as usually a tune's beat complexity/novelty and its pop-quotient will be at least partly inversely proportional.

By whenever "Shake Your Body" came out I was no longer going to d&b nights, and I suspect the tune was less welcomed on the scene, but as a pop listener the same logic applied but only more so ("Shake Your Body" is more extroverted and fun than "Hide U"): what might have seemed annoyingly straightforward as an instrumental had a very rushy (but pop rushy rather than drug rushy) sense of focus as a vocal tune.

In the context of its relationship with other dubstep, this is also true for the vocal tunes on the Magnetic Man album.

As a pop phenomenon though, I think there's a difference insofar as the sheer speed of d&b renders it a novelty in a pop context, in two senses: it stands out more as something unusual vis a vis the rest of the pop charts, and it also is not actually viable for more than a handful of chart crossover successes.

Whereas dubstep, which supports songs operating at the same tempo as R&B or standard house, is only a "novelty" in a pop context in a music-crit sense: listeners picking up on the fact of the connection with a genre nominally opposed to (or at least very distanced from) pop. Otherwise the distinction doesn't really leap out at you. Most of the pop moments on the Magnetic Man album basically sound like club-footed versions of mersh electro-house.

This makes dubstep's emergence as a replacement for mersh electro-house as a groove-prop for UK pop songs much more viable than was the case for d&b at the beginning of the 00s, but also rather less amusing/fun.

i am not sure if i am serious or joking about microhouse - it seems right but i can see the pendulum swinging back an there is still the vexing success of shit like oni ayhun and pantha du prince to consider

also what about shit like levon vincent and the pervasive basic channel influence ... how much microhouse did to keep that strand alive is open to debate

nice analysis there Tim I think u nailed it in the last three grafs

Pantha Du Prince's continuing critical popularity as compared to the rest of the microhouse generation does seem quite arbitrary.

Most of the people I know who listened to microhouse back in the day will check for Ikonika, James Blake, anything under the global bass rubric as well as Hardwax endorsed stuff (that whole Shackleton/T++ axis - no coincidence that Shackleton's EPs were released on Perlon) but definitely will not check out, let alone check for, the Magnetic Man album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd2EwAgI9LA

**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk-AQ4O5KiI

T++ is incredible though he's more like midtemp d&b in my mind than dubstep

This makes dubstep's emergence as a replacement for mersh electro-house as a groove-prop for UK pop songs much more viable than was the case for d&b at the beginning of the 00s, but also rather less amusing/fun.

I'm not sure this is really the case in the long term because dubstep just isn't flexible enough, there's a limit to how far you can go in a pop context if you have to underline everything with big thick bass. The most successful tracks here are the pop ones that abandon dubstep's rhythmic and/or textural structure - Perfect Stranger being the obvious example, it's essentially Baby D style 90s rave pop with bigger bass.

The other Katy B track, Crossover, is a great song but it suffers a bit as a result of incorporating that big thick bass sound which actually goes against the grain of the momentum of the song. It more or less works because Crossover is essentially a ballad, but as a more general model for dance-pop I'm not convinced. Commercial electrohouse works because it's easy to understand and easy to dance to, whereas dubstep deliberately makes those two things difficult.

What's also apparent about this album is the lack of rhythmic interest in the instrumental tracks, which are almost uniformly the worst. They don't seem to serve much function other than 'let me brutalise you with my enormous bass noise' - where's the "step"? With MCs over the top they might have worked, otherwise I'm not sure I see the point. They seem to be targeting people who like the idea of dance music more than the idea of actually dancing.

Also who is Sam Frank and why does he do that to his voice?

"perfect stranger" is amazing

"perfect stranger" live w/orchestra makes me v happy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXY_Z1L6EUU

i think her little vocal tics/gimmicks could get tiring over a whole album. im sure she didnt do those back on as i and tell me. song isnt bad though.

its like teen/lovers dubstep (well not dubstep really, its just 90s rave isnt it).

Her lyrics can be a little embarrassing, but she has a pleasant voice and writes good melodies.

how are her lyrics embarrassing? think they're v on point, esp "katy on a mission" and "louder"

So I sink in to the tune
As I inhale the fume
A feeling easy to resume

Examples like this read as inelegant and forced to me, and stick out when I listen to her songs. It's not a massive quibble, I'm not a big lyrics guy anyway.

i think it's pretty evocative of what it's actually like in big clubs! (and, ha, nostalgic for a pre-smoking ban time.)

Nah, you're right, she does paint a fairly vivid picture of things. I just find some of her word choices a bit try-hard or pretentious or something. Overall I quite like her.

the "a feeling easy to resume" line is a bit weak in a smart kid in high school sense, she's found something else she can say that rhymes with the previous lines but it's a choice of words you'd never use actually use but for the fact of its rhyming. I used to do this when I was required to write poetry in middle school so my first reaction is sympathy rather than irritation.

In general I've always found Katy's lyrics fine.

The other Katy B track, Crossover, is a great song but it suffers a bit as a result of incorporating that big thick bass sound which actually goes against the grain of the momentum of the song. It more or less works because Crossover is essentially a ballad, but as a more general model for dance-pop I'm not convinced. Commercial electrohouse works because it's easy to understand and easy to dance to, whereas dubstep deliberately makes those two things difficult.

I agree with this Matt but don't think it contradicts my general point - the fact that I consider dubstep more "viable" doesn't mean I think it works particularly well. Your point about "Crossover" extends to "I Need Air" and even "Fire" (and also "Katy On a Mission") - dubstep pop tunes can support several types of emotions (cocky swagger, dogged determination, moody perplexity) but would definitely struggle with an uplifting excitable anthem about love.

This to me is less about the bass per se and more about the overall rhythmic structure, which even in its mildest, most unobtrusive form still adheres to that loping, bobbing structure that can never really take off in the same way as conventional post-house genres can. In dubstep, anthemics are all centred around the drop, but it's very hard to build pop songs around a drop - unless you plan to rewind them obv.

what did you think of "wait your turn", "rockstar 101" and "g4l" off the last rihanna album, tim?

I'm into "Wait Your Turn" and (to a lesser extent) "G4L". I don't think of "Rockstar 101" as a dubstep tune at all. And "Wait Your Turn" is only a dubstep tune in the sense that, say, "Baby Boy" is a dancehall tune - it's more of a slight hint of spice to what is otherwise an R&B track. That said Rihanna chooses the perfect performative approach to both that and "G4L", being cocky swagger and dogged determination respectively... "Wait Your Turn" actually reminds me a bit of Ms Dynamite.

It actually makes me suspect that maybe Matt DC is right and I'm understating the important/deleterious role that dubstep bass plays - what's notable about the Rihanna tunes is that the bass, though prominent and cavernous, does not play that same intrusive role that it does on the Magnetic Man album.

I blame Benga, pretty much. Skream certainly has proved on many occasions that he doesn't require farty bass to make a tune.

way prefer the vocal performance on that youtube clip to the album version.

her vocal is terribly compressed on the album and pretty wobbly in places. when she goes for it with "all i really know is" it actually gets noticeably quieter and it goes "back" in the mix. shame. sounds like a music production student has made it or something.

anyway it is a lovely track, trying to be skream and la roux for 2010 rite, sounds like it'll get some decent radio play altho doesn't have the same divisive epic/annoying thing the la roux track had. would like it a lot more if it was produced a bit better, need Ame or Apparat or someone with real chops on the controls.

The stabs that open Crossover sound a bit like The Birdie Song played really fast.