Review Summary: "delete your account"
As safe of a jungle record as you can have in 2024. For how much this genre and drum and bass as a whole have come, there really isn’t anything to write home about with this new collab album from the two jungle producers. If you listen to as much of the genre as I do you will know what I mean, just fine while it’s on but not memorable in the slightest. 2.0
– ajcollins15 on Tim Reaper & Kloke's In Full Effect
I've never dedicated a whole review to a singularly dreadful piece of writing before, but you can all hold my fucking beer for this one. It is of little bearing that
In Full Effect is a thoroughly adept workout in old-school jungle with all manner of memorable touches (just you try getting "Juice"'s feverous jingles out of your head): the ignorance with which ajcollins15 approaches jungle and drum and bass is plain impermissible. Not only does he kick Tim Reaper's prestige as one of the scene's most respected producers today along the curb, where it lands somewhere nearby the record's historic status as Hyperdub's first ever drum and bass release, but he turns jungle into the same kind of novelty-fuelled arms race that has poisoned so much online-oriented music (which
loves its high-bpm breakbeats) and loses sight of what originally brought the genre its essential heart-pounding, time-freezing, loop-for-the-rest-of-your-life 'vibe'. That expectation of what good jungle should do to your body is a feature, not a fad.
From what I can make of his online footprint, ajcollins15 does
not vibe. I do not believe he has any real idea how far either jungle or drum and bass 'have' 'come'. A quick lookup suggests that he listens to a fraction as much of either as he claims, none of which dates from before 2020. It is all too easy assume his ignorance of the '90s rave scene and the poignancy of how the Reaper/Kloke joint hearkens back to this — this would certainly explain the disproportionate emphasis his limited exposure places on overstimulated e-jank (some of which certainly
does vibe in the right setting, though it never shakes off that grotty post-pandemic fixation on EDM dopa-kitsch). I see no trace of awareness or appreciation for the spartan vision and sheer kinetic rush jungle was born from, yet a startling amount of plastic. There's a time and place to make a contrarian stand on behalf of Sewersvlt and Turquoisedeath, but this should never come at the expense of grown adults whose exposure to drum and bass goes beyond the four walls of their bedroom and the dead gaze of however many 2D pinups. What can be done? We can't blame it all on aj or the video game OSTs that spawned him: there's an entire demographic whose support of drum and bass' ongoing resurgence (good) has all but completely relegated the genre to cyberspace and wiped away its dancefloor roots (bad and sad). Someone should start sponsoring these people to attend club nights. With cameras. Serialise it. Tempt them out with Machine Girl tickets if they need a gateway drug. Let Netflix foot the bill. Someone would watch it;
someone would benefit from it. Fuck me.
…and with that out of the way, no way in hell am I posting it as a review under the
In Full Effect page. God, imagine. The disrespect against Tim Reaper and Kloke would transcend anything I could throw at poor old aj's piss trail. We'll need a placeholder, a sacrificial jungle lamb so emphatically online and virally inevitable that I won't feel bad about exploiting it for my own platform, yet solid enough on its own terms that it does no harm to boost its profile. Yeah, good shitting luck navigating that transition — except! Uh. It turns out GENDEMA's latest album is the perfect fit, thank fuck. It is titled
sassy things. This fact had almost no bearing on its eligibility. On its second track, "minor cybercrimes" (a song after my own heart), it samples unmistakably flesh-and-bone breakbeats over a collage of modulated vocals ums and ers that practically reek of DAW mumblespace: both sides sound individually great yet make for surprisingly frisky bedfellows. They happen to come superimposed over instantly memeable album art. GENDEMA is but the latest addition to the ranks of ultra-obscure e-shrapnel artists who find themselves abruptly catapulted to visibility via a favourable YouTube algorithm. Well? We'll kick it.
What we have here is a thoroughly adept take on the classic '90s atmospheric drum and bass sound, where atmosphere is something one has ample room to
breathe and is rarely, if ever, injected into one's bloodstream via horrible synthetic plug-ins. It borrows very sparingly from the IDM textbook, using a mixture of classic and digital production stylings to port the past into the present, the present into the past, the future into the pocket of background concern it should never have emerged from, until all is in harmony and we can rest assured that
this is where we should have been all along. Anyway: the upshot of all this is largely successful, if a little melodically overworked at times. GENDEMA's keyboard progressions can prove too elaborate to lock into the beat as needed — "I make plans, she laughs" is the greatest culprit here, and by unhappy coincidence also the longest song. Its melodic and rhythmic sides both undergo extensive contortions, but they demand too much of one another and play out with all the superfluous false-starts of a mediocre IDM fix. Atmo drum and bass tends towards its finest when its melodies are featherweight, able to suggest whole escapist vistas with the faintest twinkle, to hold the floor when needed and to drift effortlessly over any and all breakbeat contortions, deferent to their role as the primary driving force.
A lot of the record does great justice to this idea! The best song is called "all second places", and it is full of the same twilit intrigue spangled across many a classic '90s single (Seba/Shogun/Photek/Intense/The Chameleon). It ebbs, flows, subsides, restarts, reinvents itself so organically that I am reminded
precisely why this genre is often the closest one gets to nude-mountain, boundless-ocean, big-dizzy-sky panoramic nature from any beat-fuelled genre. That it works in a lovely bass freakout at the end and grazes its early bliss-out with a collage of vocal samples for a little extra contour is par for the course. The best song title on this album is "telepathy for sluts"; the second best is "it's okay to kill an atheist". It is good that these are adjacent in the tracklist. They show off the album's rhythmic dexterity better than anything else: "sluts" chops its breaks into more splintering permutations than its lounge-ready trappings should be able to sustain (somehow the reverie never buckles), while "kill an atheist" takes the whirling, clicking, broken cycles of early Autechre and refurbishes them to elicit the breathing of oxygen and the experience of actual human joy. Too fucking right. The flattering comparisons with gold standard producers go further: the drum programming across the backend of "all second places" reminds me of Skee Mask's more intricate recent outings, but at no point does GENDEMA play as mere facsimile!
sassy things has plenty of its own personality. It feels thoroughly at ease with itself, so assured in its progressions, so steeped in the tone of its whimsical chord progressions that any perceivable intertext is secondary to the steady hand with which GENDEMA guides the whole thing. It's tight enough to call its own shots, except those brief moments when it isn't. Which we forgive. The vibe goes on. Make more plans. Laugh.
Personality alone doesn't quite cut it, though — as with so much of its kind, this album's greatest accomplishment is the way it uses its individual imprint as the means and not the end to reaffirm everything that was great about this pocket of drum and bass to begin with. Production differences notwithstanding, the atmospheric environs this thing strolls through have scarcely changed in the last thirty years.
And why would they?
Well, start taking the enduring value of great sounds for granted, and you'll have your own answer.
