Underwater Dancehall

We Say...

Review by Simon Hampson

In the past couple of years, dubstep has dramatically grown in popularity, moving from tiny London clubs frequented by a hardcore faithful to being a fixture of mainstream clubs throughout Britain. However, dubstep’s restless creativity has not been compromised by its move towards a wider audience; this offspring of UK garage and jungle still surprises with each reinvention of itself.

Underwater Dancehall, the debut album from Bristol’s Pinch, presents another stride forward for the sound. Although indubitably a dubstep album, the record largely dispenses with the pitch-black wobbling bass and lurching "half-step" beats that have come to characterise the genre, and a woozy, warm-bath gauziness replaces the dystopian paranoia and clanging metallic textures of much dubstep.

The album’s title is well-chosen: like a coral-reef dive, Underwater Dancehall presents an alien and warped world, and the familiar is refracted into shimmering beauty. On tracks such as “Get Up” and “Lazarus,” Pinch nods back to the glossy sensuality of golden-age 2-step, while also employing the crystalline sound-design and polyrhythmic fireworks of contemporary minimal techno. Pinch’s productions have a psychedelic, inviting vividness to them; each sound sparkles. The album’s hazily sweet side climaxes with “Angels in The Rain,” on which silvery Indian melodies roll in like fog over a tear-jerker of a piano figure.

Over these shifting, dreamlike sounds are laid the forthright contributions of the album’s guest vocalists, transforming the panoramic spaces of Pinch’s productions into anthemic song-structures. Juakali’s “Brighter Day” is an uplifting piece of socially conscious dancehall, with his vocals providing an irresistible rhythmic counterpoint to Pinch’s dub vapour-trails. Best of all is Yolanda’s “Get Up,” where her soulful vocals coax the low-slung burbling bass into the album’s most exuberant moment; it’s a tune that deserves to be huge in house clubs as well as on dubstep dancefloors.

Along with Burial’s Untrue album, Underwater Dancehall deftly copes with that age-old stumbling block for dance producers, the shift from DJ releases to albums, by offering an immersive and emotive sound-world. It’s testament to Pinch’s boldness in ploughing his own unique furrow that both dubstep fans and new converts are likely to be surprised and delighted by what they find.