Made: Track Title
Scsi

Made, long-time Skam affiliate and purported Gescom member Mike Williamson, slathers fourteen tracks with spacey electro-voodoo on the hour-long debut Track Title. Though the album is rooted in churning hip-hop beats, menacing tones imbue the album with a malevolent ambiance; tracks like “Carrie Delta” and “Aroh” are characteristic of the style yet also expose the album's weaknesses. Aside from hewing too much to that signature throughout (by the time the closer “Zero Four Three” appears, one's appetite for the style has been more than adequately sated), Track Title's expertly crafted material rarely develops in dramatic compositional manner. With its textural detail, rippling funk beats, and cybotron noise, “Aroh,” for example, sounds impressive but doesn't really go anywhere. The doom-laden “Clloked,” on the other hand, impresses more for gradually escalating into an intense zone of comet-like synth strafings. Still, there are memorable moments: the sinister robo-funk of “Vear One,” the coiled, steely beats and plucked string figures in “IW,” and the residue of curdling threat that haunts the simmering ruins of “Numa.” Made departs from the signature in “On/Off” where an exuberant commingling of dubby keyboard burble and gently popping beats recalls Lawrence. But Made suffers by the comparison: unlike Lawrence 's subtly evolving tracks, the more static “On/Off” repeats with slight variations, much like an athlete showing elegant form while running in one place.

September 2005