THE UPBEATS: Big Skeleton
By Jacob Connor
Wellington drum & bass duo Jeremy Glenn and Dylan Jones impressed with their two previous full-lengths, so I had high hopes for ‘Big Skeleton’. While the release is polished and propulsive, it seems less of a great leap forward than their previous high concept disc ‘Nobody’s Out There’. Perhaps that disc’s unifying theme and accompanying novella made it more cohesive. Here, an array of guest vocalists lend variety but sacrifice depth. Jess Chambers offers a female perspective and something approaching poetry in the concluding Through The Night. Macabre is a highlight, a skeletal rhythm excursion jacking on some juddering synthesis. Noises is a wistful headnodder. There are some eerie atmospheres to embellish the gravedigging theme and nice percussive details derived from found sounds. An ironic sample in The Unearthly (“It’s so quiet - kind of eerie. Gives me the creeps!”) sounds like an excerpt from Grooverider’s ‘Mysteries of Funk’. The City That Sleeps has a lonely bedsit pathos and the album as a whole flits between the necessary hydraulics of the dance floor and textures more melancholy. The Upbeats are a safe (double) pair of hands and they have crafted a beautiful slab of layered dance floor death. Sometimes a sound is profound enough.
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