The bass is over here
Jon Gooch, the mind behind EDM powerhouse Spor is out with his sophomore album High Street Creeps under the moniker Feed Me. EDM has been spinning its wheels for years, and the genre, in general, isn’t the best for the album format. Yet Feed Me stays in a lane, leaving out unnecessary remixes of the same song, and he has the self-awareness to try new things in places even though at its heart, this is still bro-y fist-pumping music.
“Perfect Blue” kicks the album off with laser-like synths, a moombahton groove and a whole bunch of atmospheric synth sounds that work well together and bring out an epic full sound. While the metallic grooves and the vocal samples sound great and keep the groove rocking, the synth patches are stale and sound pretty average. While this is a well-produced track, does it really set itself apart from the EDM that was made five or six years ago?
“Shimmer” is a lot freakier, and that is a good thing. Again, the grooves and percussion are really nice and danceable, and while the synth leads are still kind of boring, the bass is huge, pulsating and in your face, and that’s what really makes a dubstep track. The change in mood in the middle of the song shows Feed Me’s experience and attention to detail, and the buildup is also fantastic. “Sleepless” is some grimy electro-house with all the generic sounds you would expect to find in a Mau5trap label artist, but at least it has a fast-changing variety of motifs and audio artifacts that are enough to keep you awake, fist pumping and spilling Pabst on your Nikes.
“Feel Love” benefits immensely from Rosie Doonan’s vocals which are beautiful and, while pretty safe in general, sound great under Feed Me’s pulsating but relaxed electro-house. “Barrel Roll” is Dubstep as fuck with a very interesting almost classical music inspiration to it that makes it pretty interesting. The drums sound a bit thin, but it makes way for massive and cleverly composed bridge passages. “Own Ghost” takes dubstep and adds a shitload of vocal glitches and drum breaks, and while vocal chops are pretty done to death at this point, these are somehow just better and don’t sound lame. What Feed Me brings to the table for a bloated dying genre is some new ideas and great execution. It’s easy to tell he knows what he is doing behind the computer.
High Street Creeps is a competent and well-made electro-house/dubstep outing. And while the album doesn’t really tell a story or stick to a sound, it’s a fun listen with some interesting ideas. Its weaknesses are the reliance on recycled synth sounds and a predictable formula, yet he rises above many of his contemporaries in the genre in terms of attention to detail and variety.
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