Blogarhythms

Yesterday I equated vicelounge’s “Never Fall” to a hybridization of minimalist slow-jam R&B and the sonorous low-end of UK Dubstep. The irony of making such a comparison when I’d jokingly predicted R. Kelly would trade in the “Chicago Step” for Dubstep in a blog-post title last Summer amused me slightly. But more than anything it reminded me that the last big Dubstep record to grace this space, Burial’s Untrue, wasn’t just one of my favorite albums of last year, or just one of my favorite Electronic/Dance Music albums of the year, but one of my favorite Soul/R&B albums of the year as well.

Okay, I think I might have called Untrue a “deconstruction of contemporary R&B,” but it was still an R&B album to me. A mangled, backwards-engineered R&B album that retro-fitted modern radio-Soul to it’s cousin from across the pond in a manner that required hopscotching backwards from Dubstep, to 2-Step and Garage, to House, to Disco, and finally back to R&B to get to their common ancestor. And sure, it’s a stretch of conventional boundaries and genre-labels. And I totally filed it away in the “Electronica” section of my own record collection. But in my mind Untrue was an R&B album none-the-less. And an incredible one at that.

Not more than five months on from that album’s release, another standout full-length Dubstep LP, this time from Croydon-based veteran of the Dubstep scene Benga, has hit me like a ton of sub-woofers dropped from a 100-story building. And while the album, titled Diary of an Afro Warrior, is markedly different from Untrue sonically (it’s based more-so around a slow, but forcefully driving Grime-fusion sound), and vocals are sparser, it’s another collection of tunes that might be difficult to just lump in with Grime, Drum-n-Bass and IDM, or Dub Reggae for that matter, without first aknowledging their affinity for Soul, R&B, Funk and even Jazz, not to mention percussive Afro-Carribean sounds and the traditional tribal rhythms that are the very building blocks of “the beat” itself.

That’s not to say Diary of an Afro Warrior isn’t gritty, gutter, and packed to bursting with pulverizing basslines, rapid-fire hi-hats that chatter like spent shells on concrete, synths sharp as hacksaws & acidic as Spirits of Salt, drums that kick like Wong Fei Hung & snap like Men on Film, and an array of blips, bleeps, clicks, whirrrs, whistles and laser sounds. Songs like “26 Basslines,” “Crunked Up” and “Go Tell Them” are all that and more. But other tunes — “Zero M2,” with rumbling upright bass & chime-like electric piano, and “B4 the Duel,” featuring a meandering synth-horn line — recall the smoky swing and improvisation of barroom Jazz. Still others, like the sci-fi-Swamp-Beat-boogie of “Light Bulb,” the ’80s Electro-Soul-meets-G-Funk whine of “Someone 20,” and “Loose Synths,” which pits warm quiet-storm swells against tic-toc 2-Step beats, place Dubstep in a broader musical & cultural context, and show that even at its ruggedest it’s a lot more than computerized music for English kids to get stoned to.

Benga “Light Bulb”

- El Keter