Details Compassion

‘With any creative form, a bell curve reigns over the quality of the output with a theory dictating that mediocre material will sell the greatest amount, leaving the more interesting records to languish at the sales perimeter. Dance music has always been in particular sufferance of this MOR sludge, with a plethora of artists crawling to the current sound and equipping a slew of DJs with formulated sets of predicated cuts.

Every now and again however a record swings in from the outskirts, offering a glance at the bigger aural picture. Like Aphex Twin or Future Sound of London before him the production force behind the Broadway Project has done exactly that, laying down his musical agenda by way of a series of well received extended players for the respected Memphis Industries imprint.

The first taste of the Compassion LP came in the form of the thunderous “No Pain”–a sonic train wreck which counted DJ Shadow and Van Halen amongst its passengers and the album succeeds in its extension upon this premise. Each of the 14 tracks manages to tell its own story, conjuring cinematic sense from a thousand densely packed snatches of sound, while also working as part of the whole. The opening “Who’s To Blame?” sets the tone, solemn chords drifting from a barely audible atmosphere–the accompanying orchestration creaking through the mix before exploding in a percussive flourish. And so it continues, an album comparable to navigating through a sonic space as worlds of genre collide around you, twisting through a swathe of moods and emotions, at times melancholic, at others buoyant with optimism, sense of drama the single constant. In a word? Breathtaking’. -Kingsley Marshall