Review Summary: Worlds rub up against each other.
The Mistress is an oddly two-faced beast. It’s got one foot planted in the realm of pop-leaning half-time, the kind of harmonious and sometimes exceptionally dirty vocal-driven bangers that contain the potential to cross over into the more mainstream general-music blogosphere. Its other, however, remains firmly wedged into a more traditional drum & bass locale, a world of dingy Amen breaks and glimmering layers of liquid soul shakily built on top of hard-as-hell bass. There’s a collision of sorts going on here, and it’s not clear that the two disparate places
The Mistress straddles were ever meant to get along.
Granted, if anyone were going to get vaguely radio-ready hooks to cooperate alongside the sheer power of a DnB breakbeat, Spectrasoul would definitely be one of the acts of choice. The duo has come a long way since their inception, moving from bassy, heavy-hitting choons on labels like Exit and Critical to the kind of pop examinations they’ve put together so well on Shogun Audio. As such, they’re able to toy with their grounding in the more traditional UK drum & bass scene, reorganizing wicked bass and incisive hi-hats into something altogether more palatable. For example, the killer bassline in “Blindside,” menacing in almost any other context, instead sounds almost sedate here, a complement to the shimmer of the vocal samples and piano instead of the centerpiece of the song.
Of course, it might have been nice if Spectrasoul had hearkened to the past a little more faithfully. There are some weighty tunes here, but there’s nothing quite so hard as some of the stuff the duo has released in the past. While “Lights Go Down” is a nice enough slice of jungle, its excellence has more to do with the way it expertly collides trancey blasts of synth and downy vocals with cavernous blasts of snare than its potential for straight carnage on the dancefloor. There’s nothing on the level of tunes like “Organizer” or “Mimic” to be found here, though “Lights Go Down” and “Sasquatch” admittedly come somewhere in the same ballpark. As such, it seems unlikely that any of the songs on
The Mistress will be inscribed in DnB lore for ages to come, and they’ll probably not survive the same fate as some of the duo’s earlier work.
That said, though, the avenues the pop-focused material opens up more than make up for the minor failings of the DnB here. The seedy skank of “I’m Real Good” is infectious, huge drums and seductive horns making the best song on the album an absolute blast to listen to. Similarly, “Shelter” is a brilliant stab at Radio 1, muted guitar and gooey synth chords playing off Lily McKenzie’s powerful vocals with a nuance and power honed by years of careful drum & bass construction.
It’s precisely because of this mastery of the alternative-ish pop song that
The Mistress is as good as it is. Though the conflict between the pop and the drum & bass isn’t fully resolved by the end of the album, Spectrasoul has done an admirable job in coming as close as they did to reconciling the two. And, though the drum & bass here isn’t as memorable as the drum & bass from Spectrasoul’s earlier years, it’s permeated the album as a whole very positively.
The Mistress won’t have the kind of appeal many of the bass heads might have wanted out of it - but maybe that’s not such a bad thing in the end.
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