My Panda Shall Fly - Higher

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  • Suren Seneviratne has spent a few years trying to find a sound that fits. He showed off his most recent style, chewed-up analogue house, with last year's Tape Tekkno on Gang Of Ducks. It was a good look that was also timely, riding the wave of interest in lo-fi producers. For his first EP of 2014, he joins the Sonic Router camp and barks up the same tree. But while Seneviratne has the trendy part down, substance still eludes him. The way Higher drifts between genres makes it a solid fit for Oli Marlow's left-of-centre label. "Haus/Transferring Sorrow" starts things in grungy style with springy drums and synths, but it doesn't come together as anything more than the sum of its parts. Most of the tunes here trudge through their slow-motion bars almost grudgingly, and melt into amorphous breakdowns with little impact—through the jazzy house of "Groupp Mind" to the slow-mo waltz of "Crac," they all have the same formula. Seneviratne rarely sounds inspired, and his filter-happy style takes too many cues from Actress, especially on the broken techno of "Indentification" or the shuddering "Fish R Friends." It's only on "Ark (Spirit Servant)," which has all the stateliness of a funeral procession, that Seneviratne sounds comfortable in his own skin. On Tape Tekkno he found fresh earth on well-trodden ground, but on Higher he's stalling.
  • Tracklist
      01. Haus/ Transferring Sorrow 02. Ark (Spirit Servant) 03. Crac 04. Groupp Mind 05. Indentification 06. Fish R Friends
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