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Meat Beat Manifesto, "Answers Come in Dreams"
Jack Dangers has been bitten by the dubstep bug and there are no two ways about it. Answers Come in Dreams finds the long time innovator giving in to (or perhaps trying out) the style du jour for a strange distillation of his own sound.
This happened once before when Meat Beat Manifesto released a new version of "Helter Skelter" with a jungle tinge and then turned in a remix of Nine Inch Nails' "Perfect Drug" that proved that Dangers could tap into the reigning dance culture when he wasn't busy creating it.But Answers Come in Dreams is a different story.At a time when dubstep has bubbled over the rim of the underground to become the inevitable hotness for a while, the purpose of a new record from Meat Beat Manifesto that plays by the dubstep rules is a little hard to understand.
Meat Beat Manifesto is, after all, one of the progenitors of dubstep.Tracks like "Lucid Dream" from Subliminal Sandwich or pieces of Storm the Studio from all the way back in 1989 anticipate the slowed-down, dub-infused spacious stomp of contemporary dubstep.There's no doubt in my mind that Dangers' music played a role in paving a way for the wobble, so the inevitable question that Answers Come in Dreams keeps raising is "why does this record sound so little like Meat Beat Manifesto?"
Answers Come in Dreams features plenty of Meat Beat trademarks and sample callbacks, to be sure.A beat from "Spinning Round Dub" (off of 2004's RUOK in Dub) surfaces on "M Y C;" the wonderful "let me have silence" spoken piece shows up in "Token Words;" "Melt" recycles a bit of the "Radio Baylon" bassline; and the analog filtered percussion and squelchy synths on "# Zero" and "010130" sound familiar.But the album features many more tracks like the opener "Luminol" or the lfo-addled "Let Me Set" that are almost completely void of Dangers' usual charm.
Throughout, the record contains dreamy whispers of the Meat Beat sound that float deep in the background like lost radio transmissions.An occasional synth note or bubbly ambiance or waterphone drone will remind me that Dangers is in there somewhere, perhaps lost and even trying to escape from dubstep's droll plodding.But those moments are so fleeting and washed out that the whole thing feels like a dubstep remix of a Meat Beat record that could have been produced by someone else.Gone is almost all of the humor and playfulness that has been a stable of Meat Beat records since, well, always.
If all of that sounds like I'm very down on the album, I'm not.It is on its own terms a fantastic subwoofer workout and a near-perfect distillation of Meat Beat into bass and space. There are enough distorted drum breaks, spooky sonic backdrops, and waves of wobbly and overdriven low end to keep me more than happy.Jack trades in his bass guitar (for the most part) in favor of deep 808 blasts and heavy synth rumble that will not make sense at all if you aren't listening with a decent sub, and I love all of that.The beats are stripped down and the patterns in everything are simplified to give the bass room to breathe.While that takes away most of the beautiful rhythmic complexity that Meat Beat is known for, the approach is still effective here in eliciting a head nod.In fact, I tire of most dubstep so quickly that it's nice to have something that gives the low frequencies a bashing while still injecting tiny, fleeting fragments of the familiar.
V/VM (recording as The Caretaker) released a six CD box set a few years back that was inspired by the scene in The Shining where Jack Nicholson is wandering around in the old hotel ballroom and he hears the faint, ghostly melodies of a party that has long-since ended.Answers Come in Dreams feels like that to the rest of the Meat Beat catalog.It's full of half-remembered dreams and barely-recognizable fragments of Meat Beat carried on the wind and blown through empty hallways, that have somehow drifted into a dubstep party that is taking place in that empty ballroom.It's less of Dangers coming back to show the young kids how it's done and more of a seasoned pioneer playing in someone else's playground for a spell.I don't know if the dubstep die hards are going to take to a record that doesn't feel quite as up-to-the-minute as that scene requires: new sub-styles seem to come and go every fortnight.Still, Answers Come in Dreams is a dark and bass-heavy grind that benefits from Dangers' impressive ability to wring depth out of space.
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