The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 24

Scuba
Triangulation

So a few items of disclosure immediately - first off, my experience with dubstep is next to nothing. Like a lot of people, I got into Burial almost immediately without getting into dubstep as a whole. The rest of the genre has the problem that a lot of electronic subgenres have, which is that variations are hashed out on a minimal scale, and there’s is a huge glut of material that a layman would have a ton of trouble distinguishing the good from the bad. I gave it a shot, I have the 5 Years of Hyperdub box set and I’ve listened to the whole thing a few times, but I can’t get into it. Burial’s different - with that guy you draw a direct line to Rza and Tricky’s best work - and it’s real easy to write off the whole of the thing that isn’t made by Will Bevan. The other thing is - the consensus of this album on the internet is that it’s very well made but unexciting, that it's too subtle for its own good, and that it’s a toolbox for other artists (the Pitchfork review even compares it to glue). Which, yeah, it’s subtle but it’s not the kind of vanilla that word makes it sound like. This is the first dubstep album that’s been able hold my attention for its entire length, where I didn’t start skipping through the songs because yeah, they all do that drum and bass roll noise as the hi-hats click away. Scuba is barely dubstep in a lot of ways because all the aspects that make it a good dubstep record could just as easily be good dance aspects. The most genre-fitting song on the album, “Lights Out”, is buried at the end of the record (and damn if it's not a contender for best thing here).  “Lights Out” is an 8 minute climb out of darkness, where time is taken to let the song’s changes happen organically. While 8 minutes may seem like a long time, the track feels much longer, and yeah, you kind of wish it was - the percussion is aggressive but delicate, and the space that track exists in is a panoramic kind, created only using the most simple variations and dynamics. “Lights Out” isn’t great because of those dynamics, but the way that it dials back to nothing but synths at its end. The shining centerpiece of the thing is “You Got Me”, starting off as a normalized chunk of beats which is overtaken by huge melodic chunks then swings into minimalist microhouse. The live-sounding drums and vocals on “So You Think You’re Special” may sound a little too much like something Michael Mann could’ve shoved into Collateral next to Audioslave songs, but hey thats not Scuba’s fault. It's Audioslave's.

-Sean Witzke, 2010

Comments

[Tim O'Neil]

I guess I'm the opposite: I was turned-off from dubstep initially because I just can't warm to Burial. Then I got a bunch of other stuff and I like that a lot, but Burial still just sounds remarkably tepid to me. Go figure.

[Chris Jones]

I was wondering whether Scuba was worth getting into or not. Thanks for the heads up.