Review Summary: Modern neurofunk’s prodigal son comes home to find that it’s no longer the one he once knew.
Listening to
Caligo, Spor’s long-awaited debut LP, I can’t help but think of a section of
Fairy Tail, a decently terrible manga I read back in middle school. Apologies in advance for shoddy paraphrasing, as I haven’t looked at the manga in years, but in short: the main characters, some of whom have become absurdly powerful for somewhat unclear reasons over the course of the previous 250 chapters or so, fight a high-octane battle against some humongous, mythical creature. The battle, which goes on for many chapters, ends with a gigantic explosion, and when the smoke clears all the characters involved are gone. In the very next chapter, set seven years later, the characters reappear triumphantly, and their friends (who presumed them dead) tearfully welcome them back into the fold, and life resumes as normal. Only, these characters are no longer the most powerful fighters - over the course of the seven years they were gone, they fell behind in their training and were essentially relegated to the bottom of the pile of the warriors within their world. (I assume the next few hundred chapters chronicled their slow ascent back to the top, but at this point 14-year-old me had had enough and stopped reading.)
Caligo, unfortunately, presents a similar situation. Jon Gooch has spent the last five years producing and performing almost exclusively under his Feed Me alias, achieving huge financial and critical (this site excluded) success thanks to an electronic music-listening world more welcoming to midrange-heavy dubstep and dirty electro house than blistering drum & bass. Gooch also did an excellent job of building a Spor fanbase, of course: his quicksilver basslines drew in so many that at one point he was one of a tiny group of drum & bass artists with massive crossover appeal (the group largely consists of rock- and metal-esque acts like Immersion-era Pendulum and The Qemists). However, countless pleas for a Spor revival fell on deaf ears for years.
And then, of course,
Caligo happened. A series of semi-cryptic teaser tweets about a possible Spor album came to a head in December when Gooch announced that a new Spor album would be out in March. He later announced his plans to release the album on March 9 as a pay-what-you-want download via the popular torrenting engine BitTorrent followed by a physical release on March 11. Sometime last week, a promotional copy of
Caligo leaked, prompting a rightfully furious Gooch to release the album almost a month earlier than planned, and the suddenly-released torrent attracted so many people that at one point there were two users seeding while upwards of three thousand clients attempted to download the file.
Caligo very much sounds like an album we might have expected Spor to make. Despite the fact that it would never be able to live up to the near-decade of hype which had built up around it (not an indictment of Spor so much as an indictment of ravenous fans expecting far too much), it still sounds a lot like the circa-2010 Spor sound which catapulted Gooch to stardom. The absolutely devastating “Coconut” checks all the bona-fide-neurofunk-banger boxes: sci-fi movie sample, deceptively simplistic-sounding yet intricately layered drums complete with a cracking snare, and (most importantly) menacing, fluid low-end engineering. It’s pretty much an adroit summary of
Caligo as a whole - the album is a consummate return to roots, a showcase for Gooch to flex his bass-manipulating muscles and annihilate any thought that his time as Feed Me has softened him.
However, what once put Spor at the forefront of the drum & bass scene is no longer quite so interesting. Everyone and their dog is making well-produced if creatively-deficient neurofunk now, and so many of the sounds on
Caligo sound recycled from something Audio or Mefjus might have put out sometime in the past few years. We’re no longer hailing the DnB derived from guys like Ed Rush and Optical as the cutting edge - the most exciting developments are coming from the burrowing bass of Ivy Lab or Hybris’ neurofunk deconstruction. The kinds of sounds here would have been massive five years ago; now, we don’t care as much.
And while this kind of excessive name-dropping might seem like a bit of a cop-out in terms of describing the album as its own individual entity, it’s useful to invoke the names of people who have been making killer neuro wobbles to show that what used to be special just isn’t anymore. Of course, there’s some deviation from the norm on
Caligo - the top-tier brostep of “Like Clockwork,” for example, with its crystal-clear synth pads layered on top of simple, highly-rhythmic wobbles, or the way-too-short bassy crush of “Our Space.” There’s even some high-quality neurofunk here: “The Hole Where Your House Was” streaks forward at ferocious speeds, opening precipitous sonic caverns with each kick and overhauling the tempo at precisely the right moments.
However, at the end of the day,
Caligo sounds uncomfortably like a retread of what’s been done so many times before. There are just too many iterations of “Always Right, Never Left” and “Full Colour” for it to be possible to proclaim the album as forward-thinking. And while old sounds will of course reappear on most drum & bass (part of what makes new material so alluring is how well it builds on the old),
Caligo cleaves just a little too closely to the material of the days of yore to be the Spor album we wanted. Drum & bass in 2015, if it is even worth critical consideration and appreciation at all, demands a certain subtlety in approach that Spor has always rejected. Somewhere in that repudiation lies
Caligo, and its anachronistic ethos, while mildly interesting, simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
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