Rapid Fire Reviews: Outsider Electronica with Pale Sketcher, Kai Whiston & Death's Dynamic Shroud
Let's get freaky with some outside-the-box, difficult-to-describe electronic artists.
Quiet As Kept F.O.G - Kai Whiston
Darklife - Death's Dynamic Shroud
Golden Skin - Pale Sketcher
Pale Sketcher is the long-running electronic music side project of Justin Broadrick of Godflesh and Jesu fame. I like Godflesh quite a bit and I absolutely LOVE Jesu so I've been paying attention to the short Pale Sketcher releases dropping every so often for the past 12 years. Given that this is the project's first full album I was excited to hear what Justin had to offer, especially after I read on the records Bandcamp page that the music was recorded between 2009 and 2013 and has been shelved since then for some reason. All things considered, it sounds pretty aligned with the annuls of contemporary electronica which makes me wish even more that it had been released years ago as it might be looked back on as ahead of its time. With that being said I also don't think the record is necessarily strikingly unique all things considered. For those versed in the worlds of IDM, D&B, and even just straight-up dance music there will certainly be parallels to draw here. There are songs here with stuttering drum and bass breakdowns just like there are songs with glittery atmospheres and spacey vocal samples. Overall I would say the vibe leans towards IDM but with much less focus on complexity and more focus on creating an atmosphere as these tracks are pretty consistently a joy to get lost in. With just 8 songs in the mix and a few that I'm not crazy about it's hard to say the record is anything of a modern classic, but I was surprised by both how accessible and how versatile it was without ever really sounding out of its comfort zone. While die-hard Justin Broadrick fans have likely already heard the record, it's honestly one worth checking out for experimental electronic fans in general as there's certainly going to be something, potentially quite a lot of something, that you enjoy on it. 7/10
Last year I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Drayan! Kai Whiston's moderately conceptual album full of insane experimental electronic bangers that I reviewed and then warmed on more and more with further listens. It had me excited for what Kai was going to do next which was even further amplified by the tracklist here which sports features from Pussy Riot, Eden, and of course, Iglooghost. All three of those guests turn in solid contributions to some of the records best tracks. While the album occasionally wanders from the unconventional but still dancy style I was expecting, much of the record is still marked by those stuttering drums and infectious synth leads that make Kai's music so instantaneous. Even though the singles still represent most of my favorite tracks here, including the brilliant and multi-faceted T.F.J I found myself really enjoying a lot of the deep cuts too. Tracks like Peace Cowboy and Vivienne in particular won me over with repeated listens and I suspect my praise for the record will only get stronger as time goes by, much like its predecessor. Another extremely underrated part of the record that became a lot clearer to me after checking out its Bandcamp page is the narrative. Kai uses the medium of dance music as an authentic portal for storytelling as we see through the shifts in sonic style brought on by the interludes spoken throughout the record, which I believe are done by Kai's own mother who is credited as a feature on the final track. Let's talk about that final track, which takes up a fifth of the album all on its own. It's a very poignant and beautiful story of the musical journey Kai's mother took to first discover some outside-the-box sounds. What's implied is that these went on to be great influences on Kai through the guise of his mother passing them down. It's a wonderful sentiment on its own but it also does a great job wrapping up some of the core themes and sonic motifs of the record, in a similar way that Futura Free does for Blonde. This is easily my favorite Kai Whiston project yet and sneakily one of the most interesting and conceptual electronica albums I've heard in 2022. If anything I've said here sounds like it even might strike your interest, check this record out and you'll be happy you did. 8/10
Death's Dynamic Shroud is a vaporwave and experimental electronica group that I admittedly should do a better job at keeping up with, but if you saw their output, you'd understand. That's why I wasn't really ready when they dropped Faith In Persona last year to generally quite positive reviews and I didn't say anything at all about the record until year's end. I wasn't going to let this follow-up slip by me once I saw more hype surrounding it than the band's average release. Turns out compared to Faith and their classic 2015 breakout album I'll Try Living Like This, Darklife has as much adventuring but not as great results. After hearing about the great start the record allegedly got off to I was pretty disappointed that the jittery incoherence of Stay and the total flop of a climax on Judgement Bolt never grew on me. That's not to say there are no highlights in the works as the very next song Neon Memories has emerged as a favorite and there are others later on that I enjoy like Fade Persona. But the defining ethos of the record is waiting for songs with unnecessarily long runtimes to tick through their often very boring transitional phases, intros, and outros to see if the core of the track is good enough to warrant it. There are a number of songs on the record like Messe de E-102 and Rare Angel that shoot themselves in the foot with unnecessary sequences that extend the runtime of otherwise great tracks beyond all necessity. I don't love this record but I don't hate it either and there are plenty of worthwhile diversions to take. But with a runtime of 65 minutes and very few songs that come out the other end completely untainted, there are a lot of other records more worth your time as an electronic music fan this year. 5.5/10
