Gary Steel
LETHERETTE is an English duo whose brand of electronic music resembles one of those filmic monsters that, as it mutates and assimilates, takes on a combinatorial look of its host of victims.
In other words, it’s yet another album where ‘brand’, or ‘sound’, denotes very little, because it’s a fairly random sample-bag of sounds and styles that its producers have, for better or worse, decided you may enjoy.
On the whole, it’s a mildly enjoyable experience. ‘After Dawn’, for instance, sounds like an intentionally rhythmically co ordinated nonplace chill zone between two clubs, a kind of funk house groove that’s slow but tightly coiled and features the now ubiquitous sped-up ‘diva’ vocal that could, in fact, be anyone. Its followup, ‘D&T’, cleverly uses filters/contrasts to induce an audio illusion of stoned immaculacy, while ‘Restless’ is classic machine funk with a vaguely Detroit techno steeliness.
In other words, it’s eclectic. The biggest unifying factor is the stuttering cut-up house and the sped-up vocal tics that appear on a number of tracks, and although there’s nothing new about any of that, they do it with some style.
For every more or less conventional chiller-groove, there’s another cut that goes all weird, like ‘Boosted’ (which is all wonky and askew) and the last two tracks: ‘Hard Martha’ is a desolate-sounding pitter-patter, while ‘Say The Sun’ starts out all manic-depressive and trails out on an indeterminate melancholy lope.
Sonically, it’s a lot more nourishing than those Brainfeeder label outings, and it does get its groove on, but if I were running Ninja Tune, I would have expected something a little stronger and more definitive from a signing, even first time round. GARY STEEL
Music = 3/5
Sound = 3.5/5
