Album Reviews

Blackest Ever Black

Bristol-based producer and label owner Dan Davies has developed an impressive network of innovative, underground imprints within the city over the last few years. From No Corner to Hotline Recordings, Lava Lava, Peng Sound and FuckPunk, Davies has built a distinctive and uncompromising wave of fresh underground energy. His debut album, out on Blackest Ever Black is no less singular. Channelling dark, dubby energy and snarling industrial mechanics, Devil’s Dance sucks you into its tense, unnerving, and subterranean world. His mutant strain of dub techno is addictively disorientating and infectious, constructing immersive soundscapes out of a ramshackle collection of smudged bass, layers of distortion, decaying structures, rattling rhythms and otherworldly synth lines. Drawing on elements of techno, dub, industrial, post-punk, drone, jazz and even hip-hop,

Devil’s Dance is a genre-defying slice of contemporary abstraction. A cross between a techno club from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and the sinister atmosphere of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Devil’s

Dance takes you down uncharted, unlit paths at every opportunity. Turbulent, frazzled, smoked out, but bristling with energy and life, the record has a pulsing, shuffling momentum that propels the album forward, even after the slowed-down, spacious and more introspective tracks spattered throughout. Fascinating, expansive, diverse and forward-thinking, this is a brilliantly accomplished and idiosyncratic debut from Ossia. Tom Jones ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Radiation, Dub Hell, Vertigo| 9/10