Review Summary: Be formless, shapeless
Given NickBee’s propensity for savage, destructive drum & bass, it comes as no surprise that his debut full-length,
Empty Your Mind, suffers countless concussive blows from breakbeat after breakbeat. “Suffers” is an especially apt word to describe why, exactly, the album falls short of greatness - in spite of the sheer mass of the ramming kicks and colossal basslines, the young producer (née Nick Bogomolev) has created an LP symptomatic of the current low-end-heavy DnB scene: experimentation and artistic risks fall by the wayside in favor of focusing on achieving the most compression possible. No matter how battering the drums, how vicious the bass, an album based entirely on trends that have existed for years can only go so far, and this release is no exception.
Make no mistake,
Empty Your Mind is a well-constructed album - NickBee covers an admirable array of bass-focused musical styles with aplomb. Of course, you’ve got the typically hard-hitting DnB he’s known for, like punishing lead single “Empty Your Mind” and its flipping, flowing neuro growls. As much as it’s a bit of a cliche at this point (slow, ominous build, climaxing with a Bruce Lee sample immediately preceding a brutal, frenetic breakbeat), the song, along with the other uptempo breaks present, never pretended to be anything else - anyone going into
Empty Your Mind should have anticipated an abundance of chest-rattling neurofunk. As such, the funky house and the moody garage of the album’s mid-section come as a welcome surprise. Bogomolev’s watertight snares and pounding kicks contrast nicely with the warm bass tones of “Kloe” and the dubby organ and lurching 2-step of “Black & White,” welcome relief from the intense distortion the producer executes so well.
That said, there’s something overwhelmingly forgettable about the whole experience. Given the glut of bass-heavy neurofunk and techstep released every day,
Empty Your Mind needed some sort of extra-special element to push it from “very good” to “great” - some kind of elusive “flow,” anything giving it at least the facade of continuity and cohesion. However, the end result of the eleven somewhat disjointed tracks is that the album feels like a collection of very good singles or EPs instead of justifying its feature-length runtime. And, given the prevalence of that pervasive attitude of “compendium” in place of “continuous experience,” especially within the drum & bass scene, it’s difficult to fault Bogomolev too heavily for his shortcomings. Unfortunately, despite all of its successes,
Empty Your Mind is most likely destined to fade into obscurity shortly (a few months? a year?) like most of its compatriots, replaced by the next ruthless and ephemeral collection of low-frequency breaks.
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