Hardcore Breaks

*Review* 2 Fresh 004

 

Ok, next up is the latest release from the London based ‘2 Fresh’ records.

This is a nice easy release for me to talk about, cos it only has 2 tracks!!!  And they are as follows:

Enzyme & Malice – The Virus
Mulder – Soundclash

Ok, The Virus.  This starts with a nice bleepy arpeggio, and some wierd squelchy vocals, some gated amens drop into a standard d’n'b beat pattern, and it picks up pace nicely.  We get a bass break, with the aforementioned vocals, and into an oldskooly sounding stab.  Pepper in some classic ‘all junglists’ samples and pick up the pace with some nice clean amen patterns.  The tune comes in with some wobby bass, and chops and changes between this and the oldskooly stab pattern.  The middle breaks sees us treated to a nice ragga piano, that gives it a jungle feel, as quick as that arrives it gone again, into a different, but still quite dirty, bass pattern.  It’s hard to keep up with this track.  It mainly consists of 4 or 5 different riffs that chop and change between each other, every 8 bars or so.  Its a busy track, that sounds deceptively simple, but listening in closely, its got some nice production in there.  Slightly darker than ‘the norm’ this is a good track that sounds oldskool in influence, but up-to-date in sound.  If you gets me.

Mulder is next.  Is this the same Mulder of Urban Takeover fame?  Not sure, but this, as you can guess by the title, is jungle influenced again.  Starting with the off beat ragga stabs, and the traditional ragga bleep, add the vocal (incomprehesible to me, haha),  and slip in a cheeky amen completes the intro.  The next section is a traditional sounding stab, that sounds a lot cleaner that in a lot of tracks.  This runs into a ragga female vocal section that just bounces along nicely, the beat pattern and the background music adding to it.  Next comes along a string section, with a ‘Jonny L – Hurt You So’ bleep pushing it along.  This then goes back into the original stab pattern, then back into the bleep pattern, then back into the female vocal.  Again, this moves in a similar style to the A-side, jungle influenced, heavy on the amens, and fast moving changes in the track.  Again, the production is of a lot higher quality than ‘Back in the day’ and here we see two different, but similar styled tracks.

Overall,  this is a good release.  I like both tunes, and it’s strange, cos I dont find myself drawn to either one over the other.  This release is heavy enough (with the amens) to be Hardcore, but listenable enough to dance to.  Pleasing to the ear, if you get me.  Traditional, but up to date.  Sounds like the 2 Fresh boys have found a formula, and made it work for them.

It’s worth a listen a few times on this one.  I guarantee, musically, you will enjoy this release.  So go check it out, and buy it if you like it!  It’s worth £6 of anyones cashflow.

Even if you are on the dole.  Be a drug dealer, steal, sell the cat, or something for that £6.  It’s money well spent.

Until next time…..
The Mix Analyst

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.