Pinch & Shackleton | Pinch & Shackleton

Honest Jon's Records (2011)
By MICHAEL C. WALSH  |  November 29, 2011
3.5 3.5 Stars

pinch-m

Honest Jon's Records is nearing deity status within the pantheon of electronic music labels. After rattling off a clip of finely curated releases from a number of reclusive techno gods — with Ricardo Villalobos, Moritz von Oswald, and Actress amongst them — the London-based imprint has procured this golden calf from a pair of dub heathens. And though admittedly this bomb of a collaboration would've left a more vast crater buzz-wise had it dropped in, say, 2008 — when Pinch scorched the earth for dubstep as we now know it and Shackleton foraged in fields that still don't have accurate descriptors — to complain would be churlish. This release functions as a fully realized product because it sounds like neither of their previous exports, with both artists scaling back on their hard-nosed tendencies. The pair never allow the effort to fly far off course. For example: faced with a two-minute buildup of detached chimes and crunching drones, one would expect the track "Monks on the Run" to devolve into guttural womp. Instead, the duo skip into four-four territory, bearing doom but never pummeling. Most of the offerings here adhere to that formula, delivering 55 minutes of pit-in-your-gut tension from two of bass music's foremost masterminds.
  Topics: CD Reviews , Music, CD reviews, electronic
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