Album Review

The Roots of El-B

El-B
The Roots of El-B

[Tempa; 2009]

7.0

Find it at: Insound | eMusic | Lala

Buyer beware: A ripped-to-digital copy of The Roots of El-B, run through your off-the-rack laptop, could turn you into one of those fogies lamenting the loss of old-fashioned, around-the-room speaker placement. Dance music always mutates, usually in predictable ways, when repackaged for CD, thanks to all the familiar sonic limitations of home playback devices. (No earbuds will ever work as proper bass bins when they're not even designed with the same net effect in mind.) The dance fan makes peace that she's buying a compromised product, or at least something she has to learn to hear and enjoy minus the thick, 3-D depth of a really sweet club sound system. This cruel squishing of nuance is old news to anyone who owns more than one single-artist singles collection purchased from the electronic section.

And The Roots of El-B could potentially suffer more than most, because this is gloriously thick, 3-D, nuanced dance music. El-B is one of several pseudonyms adopted by UK producer Lewis Beadle in the late 1990s/early 00s, the moment when serious-minded dubstep first threatened to secede from London's happy-go-lucky garage culture. For a time, El-B was a master of taking UK garage's bright and peppy grooves and perverting them with slow, mean, overwhelming basslines. It was a low-end sound that was mechanically alienating, like wobbling bursts of between-stations radio fuzz squeezed and molded until fat and spherical. But El-B also loved a free-flowing, almost formless sensation of pure weight, holding a flame to the coiling b-lines of Jamaican dub until the shape melted away.

Unfortunately, pace my opening graf, you're going to get only a pale approximation of this totalizing oomph, of how these basslines could feel like concrete slowly setting in the spaces between dancers. Thankfully El-B also produced what so many of his dubstep-identified followers did (or could) not: gloriously intricate rhythms, their brittle timbre just about perfect for the thin top-end that's usually the bane of the bargain stereo. Each tune is built on a dizzying drum track, uniform in their post-jungle approach to fractured but tightly arranged rhythm, but never same-y sounding like the dullest two-step drum'n'bass. A jerking or clonking kick drum reminds you this is body music, while El-B swings severely syncopated hi-hats and snares that verge on disorienting if followed too closely. He then maps out every remaining millisecond-sized nook and cranny between the tautly stitched beats, and somehow finds room for horns ("Express"), vocal samples ("Lyrical Tempo"), and a myriad of little percussion flourishes (just about every track). El-B's genius is in, say, the way he keeps throwing maddening did-I-actually-just-hear-that? offbeats and rhythmic feints into the mesh of jazzy brass stabs and garage drums on "Among the Stars", while keeping things orderly enough to suit dancers who don't have the luxury of hitting rewind to pick apart his grooves for a second or third time.

The tidiness of his micro-edited rhythms means some of the tracks could sound repetitive, rather than hypnotic, on first listen. Crank a seemingly static track like "Digital", however, and all of a sudden you notice how elastically the bassline stretches around and between the implacable snare cracks. The slithers of cymbal and spasms of snare that add little spikes of energy to a groove that might otherwise drag. The patiently layered horror movie synth drones, blowing over the groove like cold winds. While The Roots of El-B isn't all "dark swing," to use a phrase bandied around the scene for a minute before "dubstep" finally stuck, it is helpful to remember that Beadle was one of the key producers in (for better or worse) moving UK garage away from the sugary, full-vocal pop remixes of its crossover heyday. Like many dance music full-lengths, The Roots of El-B demands devotion to pure rhythm, a willingness to trade songs for the percussive arrangement of pure sound, rewarding your fealty to syncopation more richly than most.

— Jess Harvell, June 17, 2009


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