Review Summary: With The Cold In You Phaeleh continues to refine and enhance his craft with an EP full of drugged out bliss and wandering isolation
Listening to the music of Matt Preston's alter-ego Phaeleh is not entirely dissimilar to waking up and finding oneself trapped in a snow globe. At its core, everything is decidedly serene and simple; the edges however, are rough and jagged, toying in their confinement. He traps brief moments of frozen serenity like snowflakes in a jar, and then shakes them violently, capturing the resulting chaos from a distance. His music is the kind of jam we're all used to, but the showcase is unique in the same kind of way that sees us on edge every time deja vu sparks a fear of the unknown in us: we've somehow been here before, and yet it's all still a mystery. Like a hazy Sunday morning where our mind plays tricks on us and images tend to exist in the blurry corners of our vision that shouldn't rightfully be there. Phaeleh makes music for those sacred moments, where everything is as sharp as glass and hits us harder because of our somewhat more vulnerable states. He turns on us in the same way that a cold burst of air bites into us and chills through to the bone, he inhabits us with his music, and snaps us back to reality in the process. There are times when his music seems to almost not move at all, seemingly frozen in mid-air and just gently shimmering under its false light.
The Cold In You plays out in much the same fashion as his acclaimed sophomore effort
Fallen Light. He crafts his dubstep as an almost empty skeleton, leaving whole sections void of form and beat, drawing out emotion from the empty space like a well. Coming from a background as a classically trained composer, Preston brings with him an assortment of odds and ends not commonly seen within the underground that he's fallen deep into; he eschews a similar design to that of Clubroot (an artist he constantly finds himself compared to), whereby his music exists free form somewhere between the depths of shaky London dubstep and the more divine and surreal nature of pure ambient. He constructs whole songs from a simple piano line, the keys delicately unfolding at a lovers pace. Dream-like yet full-bodied strings bend and buckle under his touch, gently undulating and caressing the loose rattle of the bass that he utilizes almost sparingly. He approaches his craft almost from a distance, casually observing as his sequenced percussion springs to life under a sky of violins and cradling keys, rather than bury himself deep within his own maze. As a result, the progression of his songs emerges slowly yet dutifully, all working under their own clockwork and to their own distinct rhythm. Nothing is too complex and discombobulated, the simple patterns act as a catalyst for the emotional out-pouring felt under just the briefest of keystrokes.
On 'Perilous' Phaeleh discards this approach however, instead throwing his all into a bass driven banger that shakes and convulses under its own paranoia. But it's when he keeps to his own unique brand of ice chilled dubstep (how a term like chillstep has managed to avoid bastardization at the hands of the blogosphere is beyond me) that he serves up the EP's highlights; it's the little segments embedded within 'Think About It' and 'In The Twilight' where he signifies his mark as an artist able to conjure magnificence out of thin air. It's in those bursts of genius where a tag like future garage begins to sound almost credible as Phaeleh playfully toys with 2-step by sending it off under a blanket of floating strings. Or when Soundmouse makes her welcome return in the title track and sketches out a poem over the clipped garage throwbacks; it's in these delicate moments where Phaeleh shows us that he's only getting better as an artist and one who deserves your eyes on him.
