- In the holiday resort that is dance music, Filter Dread is a German tourist: he got his beach towel onto a good deckchair early and he's not moving till its time to go home. The Data Bass EP works similarly to 2013's breakthrough Space Loops cassette and the releases that came after. Yes, the genres vary—anything that has served sweaty UK dance floors in the last 25 years is fair game—but the way Filter Dread stitches them into his own Frankenstein's monsters is much the same.
This isn't a massive problem on Data Bass, released by the Red Eye Records-related Fresh 86. If anything, the record gets a new shot of energy through association: the label was first active in the mid-'90s, releasing the sort of jungle records Filter Dread presumably worships. Ideas from the era figure strongly. "Flat Bass" and "Dream Data"'s warped basslines and lumbering backbeats suggest jungle-hardcore slowed to a comedy bounce. The former is peppered with shrill whistle samples to heighten the rave vibe. On "Data Pulse," thin breakbeats pinball through a maze of bleepy percussion samples. The thing can never quite get going, repeatedly stuttering to a halt over a throbbing one-note bassline.
The EP's other major touchpoint is grime: the spacey "Panic Attacks" and the cone-crinkling "Data Bass" owe something to the style's Meccano-like arrangements. But Filter Dread returns to jungle for the EP's strongest—or at least strangest—track. "Good Lookin" makes a hobnailed house stomp out of an Amen break, spewing thick clods of delay as it goes.
TracklistA1 Panic Attacks
A2 Flat Bass
A3 Data Bass
B1 Data Pulse
B2 Dream Data
B3 Looking Good