Coalition Presents Girl Unit @ Sneaky Petes, 21 Aug

The final week of the festival needs to start with a bang and Girl Unit’s outing at Coalition seems the very ticket. Don’t worry that the man behind some of last year’s most club smashing tunes, Phil Gamble, goes by such a dubious moniker or that the acronym it spawned from, Girl U No Its True, is a Milli Vanilli album title.

In the last two years he’s developed a strong and identifiable dubstep influenced sound and the records he’s released on the Night Slugs label are a sonic mishmash of unpredictable styles. Temple Keys’s smooth house sounds and the twisted vocals and spiky strings of Wut only loosely suggest the limits that Girl Unit’s music exists within. A broad range of electronic influences is also evident in his sets and he has little compunction against throwing some hip-hop and R‘n’B up against the harder edged bass stuff to see what sticks. He has talked before about his ambition to work with more rappers and singers and his use of vocal dynamics from the records he spins adds a further dimension to the bass heavy, future sounds he already is working with.