Given that drum & bass artists are typically only expected to be able to do one thing well - be it snarling rollers, glassy liquid, or high-octane neurofunk - it comes as little surprise that Stray has taken the world by storm so quickly. The London-based producer has shown an impressive aptitude for not only dark, twisty drum & bass destroyers but also left-field uptempo half-time that draws from everything from dreamy hip-hop to bone-shattering footwork and juke. To put it succinctly, the man turns everything he touches to gold (even pained, soulful drum & bass, for crying out loud - “Live On Your Smile,” a tune Stray made with fellow producers Sabre & Halogenix as Ivy Lab, is probably one of the finest liquid DnB tunes ever). No matter what kinds of antiquated mish-mash he’s throwing into his digital audio workstation, whatever comes out the other end always manages to ride the cutting-edge of breakneck electronic, flipping and ripping the input until it becomes unrecognizable.
Stray’s stellar
Paradise EP, then, is less a simple collection of new songs to play out than a successful attempt to prove that his modus operandi is still driving him forward. It’s a shotgun blast of a release, skipping abruptly from off-kilter hip-hop to straight-laced drum & bass to unsettling bass explorations. There’s a sense of immaturity about the EP, in that it toys with ideas only as long as they’re interesting before dropping them haphazardly on the floor and moving on to the next one. What’s more, while it’s still playing with one of these concepts, it’s doing so with the curiosity and wonder of a small child. The title track is a puddle of contorted vocal snatches strewn about wistful, helium-light chords which bite in quickly and leap back out almost as soon as they’ve entered. It’s an odd structure, to be sure - part wonky, part J Dilla, part laser-focused drum & bass - but Stray has balanced its precarious composition so artfully that though one poke might topple the whole thing, it’s designed to pop right back up, insistent and unforgettable.
The rest of the EP follows the lead of “Paradise.” “Movements” is a tune that treads steadily forward with its eyes down, wrapping a warm funk bassline around a hesitant beat and almost subconscious jangles of chord. It worms carefully through a foggy R&B backdrop, tethered to the ground by its occasionally vicious bass though its clinking cymbals yearn to break free. Soon after, “Without You” drops all pretense of insubstantial hip-hop and thrusts into a killer slice of jungle, ominous stuttering and splashy snares cutting through the wooziness of earlier like a switchblade. Anticipating the terrifying bounce and bass of the following track (“Branflakes”), “Without You” drops the listener into an unforgiving arena of asphalt-black sound, panicked and petrified and so unlike the four tracks which came before.
If there’s one problem with
Paradise, it’s that its length is supremely unsatisfying. Stray blows through so much material so quickly that the EP is over almost as soon as the listener locks into its groove. Of course, that’s the hazard of EPs - they’re typically only four or five tracks long, a sampler of tracks of which an entire album might get tiresome. However,
Paradise feels like it’s so self-contained and full that it’s disappointing it ends so soon - an extra twenty or thirty minutes of like-minded music might have helped pad
Paradise out to a far more satisfying degree. That being said, though, better an all-too-short release than an all-too-long one, and the EP might help set the stage for a fully-realized LP somewhere down the line. Until then, we’ve been provided with a tasty morsel of the ideas rebounding around the head of one of the most impressive drum & bass jack-of-all-trades producers today. It might not be all that we wanted - but it’s pretty damn close.
