(Text Records)
While their signature sonic flotsam and spartan melodies are present, Eno’s contributions prove witlessly unimaginative while his mentee’s are trite
After recently closing out Coachella with UK bass rollers, heady trance and comedy dubstep in his trio with Skrillex and Four Tet, Fred again..’s next move is a quite colossal dynamic shift: releasing an album of ambient songs made with Brian Eno. The pair go way back, to 2010 and Fred again..’s mid-teens, when a mutual friend invited the boy who was then just Fred Gibson to join a singing group of Eno’s. Eno is not his godfather, as has been widely rumoured, but he quickly became a mentor, bringing him on to co-production projects. Gibson also went to a very posh boarding school and descends from an aristocratic family line: making an album with an axis of his already considerable privilege has already riled many in the dance underground.
’Twas ever thus in a scene that is, sometimes for worse but mostly for better, always patrolling the nebulous boundaries of the genre’s mainstream and suspicious of interlopers, particularly monied ones. But there’s a much larger audience on the other side of that wall: Gibson’s fanbase of young ravers who adore his garage-adjacent tracks and dextrous live drum programming, his most successful solo phase after years of also-very-successful pop and rap production for others including Ed Sheeran. With intensity and density maxed out, his work can be brilliant, as on tracks such as Delilah, Jungle and Baxter, which seem to fishtail through their respective raves. And even if his guest vocalists can let him down – such as the colossally annoying Blessed Madonna speeches on his big Covid hit Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing) – he often writes bright, insidious melodies.
Continue reading...by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian
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