- Having debuted last summer with an EP on I Used To Sleep At Night that touched on a number of stops along the bass-house continuum, Niall Cropper's Blah Blah Blah debut contains his most cohesive work to date. Best of all, he sounds like he's having a whole bunch of fun while doing it.
"Drift" begins with a twinkling music box melody that's offset by low-end rumble, elegantly transforming the track into shimmering, arp-drenched house. Propelled by an elastic bassline and entwined by snake-hipped synths, it screams summer. As lovely as it is, it's "Deeper" that will garner the most attention. A feature of Huxley's recent Boiler Room set, it dispenses with "Drift"'s opening niceties and goes straight for the dance floor jugular, dragged there on a complex rhythm that—unwittingly or not—owes a debt to the stop-start rhythms of soca. Around it, Cropper builds a wall of trippy analogue synths, fizzing disco pulses, dubbed out, Jamiroquai-sampling vocals and a brooding interjection from a chapel-style organ. The London-based Bristolian has a way with twisting the maximum value out of his basslines and integrating them with rhythm tracks that kick hard but subtlety. Cropper's one to watch, on this evidence.
Tracklist A Drift ft. Schumen
B Deeper