2562 - Unbalance

It’s dubstep, but not as Streatham or Croydon would know it. This second album from the Hague-based 2562 takes the blueprint of monstrous, murky bass, stop-start beats and disjointed samples that was drawn up in the suburbs of South London, and takes it on a jaunt to Detroit via Berlin. The arpeggiated bleeps and emotive synths of the Motor City dance over the Basic Channel-esque dubby basslines and compressed minimalism of the techno capital of Europe. From its inception, dubstep was typecast as lonely, male-dominated bedroom music, loved as much for its technological mastery as its tunes, and Unbalance doesn’t do much to change that stereotype. It’s clipped, sparse and rather cold in places. But when the production allows some humanity to bleed through, as it does with the snippets of tweaked female vocals of Lost or the ghostly chords of Escape Velocity, the results are nothing short of beautiful. The future of dubstep looks assured. [Euan Ferguson]