| This new record from the Mush stable is smooth and refined like French silk pie. Villain Accelerate have whipped up a batch of seductive, lovably thick downtempo tracks that are as elegantly produced as they are easy to get lost in. The beats are voluptuous, wooden-sounding and finessed beyond the simple sample-loop-repeat techniques that so many similar but inferior records employ. Rhodes, real bass and guitar help to fuse the tracks with a laid-back energy, and allow the composers to create real melodies that curl around sampled backgrounds with ease. Interjections of turntable manipulation ground the tracks in the hip-hop tradition, but the absence of vocals lets the listener craft his own narrative for the soundtrack. What makes a lot of instrumental hip-hop and downtempo material seem flat is the fractured nature of composing tracks from records and samplers. In the right hands, the sound fragments can be genius, but rarely do they ever invoke the spirits of a smoke-filled lounge on the down-low, with velvety loveseats and short glasses of whiskey the way the songs on Maid of Gold do. But to characterize this album as a passive soundtrack for the modern speakeasy would be doing it a disservice. Nestled into the rhythmic structures and simple, but refined melodies are the dissonant sounds of a David Lynch feature; buzzing drones and off-kilter loops lend an uneasy ambiance to the lounge. Though the album appropriately stops just sort of sounding sinister, it involves enough depth of character to avoid becoming mere trip-hop compilation fodder. Maid of Gold is a sublime record, full of flavors that can be digested easily, but with a sophisticated after taste. - The Brainwashed Brain |
2XLP/Out Of Print