Half
The Battle is an album of remixes of Machine Drum
tracks and it’s chock full of big beats. Some
tracks hurry along as if late for something really important,
others stomp around as if just plain angry at the world.
Most deploy a hiphop template. Half The Battle
starts off sounding motoric, motorised, programmed,
but later on the feeling gets more ethereal, dreamy
and wistful.
Many of Half The Battle’s tracks feature
vocals caught and tortured like a face in a shattered
mirror: stuttering consonants out without ever making
words, cussing, derailed and simultaneously mechanised.
When an intelligible sentiment becomes audible, for
example: 'I love you, I dream of the day we can be together',
its vocodered anonymity and repetition render it too
spooky to be in any way comforting. Later, on Izey
Rael (Lackluster Mix), a genuine degree of pathos
is achieved by the foregrounding of exhausted, grainy
voices which sound like they’re calling from faded
photographs.
Throughout, slow innocent melodies snake their way behind
and around the beats and the vocals. Occasionally they
threaten to drown everything else out like a huge shoal
of seaweed might entangle and drag down an unwary swimmer.
Machine Drum’s melodies function in a number of
ways: initially like an airborne sedative - spooky,
untrustworthy and controlling, but later like a nostalgic
thread of memory to be held onto in the hope of redemption.
Urban Biology is a little more chilled, a little
more spacious than Half The Battle. Tracks
like Urban Biology and Dog Day are
pure ambient forays and serve as welcome interludes
to the more beat oriented numbers. Having said that
the template of beats, cut up vocals and dreamy melodies
remains the same.
Think Logan’s Run, Soylent Green,
Stepford Wives. Machine Drum operate where
two rivers run together, the rivers’ names are
Boards Of Canada and Prefuse
73. If you’re a fan of either, go swim with
Machine Drum.
Colin Buttimer
Half The Battle 3/5 / Urban Biology 3/5
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