gif of a landslide demolishing a house, over and over-awe-inspiring violence reduced to a few elegant strokes. "Core", with its Middle Eastern reed melody and jump-up vocal refrain, is a veritable earthquake of a tune it comes on like a. Had he stuck to his favored lane, in fact, he could have gotten a potent six-track EP out of VOID. Steinway sounds far more at home when he's making trap. Steinway overcompensates by piling on turgid synths, trap hi-hats, and pitch-shifted echoes of Krell's voice run through oodles of reverb. Tom Krell's falsetto is strained and pitchy, and there are points where it might be confused for an ungenerous parody of Bon Iver.
#Rl grime aurora album info how to
Ecstatic drum'n'bass roller? Come and get it! Then there's "Reminder", Steinway's contribution to the burgeoning canon of gauzy R&B, complete with guest vocals from How to Dress Well himself. Non-beat-gridded "cosmic" interlude? Check. Too many of these feel like items on an imaginary checklist of requirements for any "serious" dance album. The opening "Always" features a pitch-shifted Janet Jackson sample over moody minor chords and 2-steppy drum programming that invariably bring to mind Four Tet and Burial it's followed by the Boys Noize co-production "Danger", a taut-electro-techno stormer aimed at Boddika's sullen corner of the dance floor.īoth tracks sound like attempts to shore up his underground bona fides, but neither are exactly best-in-class productions, which is a problem that plagues the album: RL Grime may have range, but he doesn't have a terribly original voice. It's refreshing to see him unbound by genre strictures, but it can seem like he's trying too hard to please too many people. Roughly half of the album forsakes trap in favor of various bass-heavy strains of club music or its home-listening variants. With VOID, his debut album, he's clearly keen to showcase his versatility. Recently, RL Grime's profile has risen considerably via his interpretation of "trap," a gruff, swaggering style informed by Southern hip-hop and Dutch hardstyle. A 2011 mix sketched the outlines of his adopted terrain: Rustie, Untold, and Joy Orbison on the one hand, and Drake, D'Angelo, and Missy Elliott on the other. Inspired, he has said, by both James Blake and Lex Luger, he set about attempting to connect those worlds with a cat's-cradle of pitched-up vocals, chiming keys, diamond-cutter snares, and clickety-clackety hi-hats. Clockwork fit the profile of an EDM main-stager: he bootlegged Avicii's "Levels", dealt in crowd-stoking mashups ( Wolfgang Gartner's "Nuke" with the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army", for instance), and harnessed the usual array of atom-smashing snares, roller-coaster crescendos, and supersonic whoosh.Īround the same time that he first signed to Dim Mak, Steinway began exploring a different sound under the alias RL Grime. For a time, he was known principally as Clockwork, a maker of brash, energetic electro-house for labels like Steve Aoki's Dim Mak and Diplo's Mad Decent. The budding career of a 23-year-old producer named Henry Steinway is exemplary of this shift in dance music's politics.
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