Artist - PANTyRAiD
Title - The Sauce
Release Date - September 21st 2009
Label - Marine Parade
PANTyRAiD are Josh Mayer aka Ooah of The Glitch Mob and Marty Folb aka Marty Party. They make brilliantly futuristic hip hop, in their own words: "PANTyRAiD is a true cross over project - hip hop, dubstep, electro-crunk... all done right with hard booty shaking instrumentation" I can only confirm the accuracy of this description.
The Sauce, full-length album of PANTyRAiD eagerly awaited by their fans will drop officially next Monday 21 September 2009 on Marine Parade but you can grab it already from Bleep (look for a link at the bottom).
In The Sauce, PANTyRAiD delivers a very unique and original ‘made in West Coast’ blend, floating between diverse styles of electronic music with ease and craft. Crunky, wonky, heavy, spacey …. one can add many more adjectives here. It’s quite difficult to describe their music in a few words, which is always a good sign. The shattered, looped and glitched hip hop beats colliding with heavy dubstep bass, riding a slow-mo rollercoaster of beautiful, oneiric melodies reminding me of cinematic score or android dreams. Electronic in form and glitchy in contents, with quite widely expanded instrumentation and great focus on details. Heavy, disturbing and unsettling, yet so fragile. No two songs resemble each other but all of them sum up to the top-notch whole. For me personally, The Sauce is the ultimate listening experience. Pardon my bombastic statements but this is how I feel hearing Dreaming, Worship the Sun, Enter the Machine or Upset.
The album starts with Crunculicious. Very sleek, crunky beat with lazer synths, ass-kicking snares and lots of music ‘maneuvers’ along the way. Welcome to the vast instrumentarium of PANTyRAiD! Moving to beautiful piano in Upset, the listener is flooded with very versatile beat and nicely deconstructed glitched bassline. African chants add a really weird dimension to this track. It sounds as if you heard this somewhere but cannot remember where and when. PANTyRAiD seems to open a hidden path to some archetype or a strong music mem. This one will definitely be heavily rinsed by DJ’s and fans. Marty Party and Ooah follow the similar concept but with more epic touch in Worship the sun. Ethno-oriented bomb, where tribal gathering of sun worshippers (not necessarily archaic ones) collides with mutated hip-hop beats and infectious acapellas creating a fantastic electronic voyage in the process. These guys really know how to build mesmerizing and powerful sonic landscapes. Dreaming is my personal best track of the The Sauce. One can definitely hear inspiration from former solo productions of Ooah and the title speaks for itself. Digital dream full of artificial liquidity and low-key frequencies. The music of sentient AI traversing extensive virtual data fields in search of L.I.F.E. One of the best ambient (yes!) tracks I’ve heard in ages.
After a short trip into calm territories, PANTyRAiD’ers show their music in full gear in two mid-tempo tunes. One mo! attacks the listener with disturbing, glitched synths, raw and unsettling rhythm in a heavy shit bomb! Just wait when acapella drops! It’s funktastic! Headcase on the other hand is pure glitch hop heaven with very characteristic wobbly bassline (the real PantyRaid trademark) and fantastic melody. Beba Be ba Be Be Be ba Be ba, infectious vocal job in a nasty hip-hop track, a real crowd-pleaser. This time, dirty bass is crunked to the max, hooking the listeners instantaneously.
Enter the machine simply overwhelms. Great track, for me personally the tip of the release next to Dreaming. This slow wobble and ultra distorted bassline is just my thang! It builds and twists like a snake. Sounds like dubstep but there are much more layers in this single track than in 10 typical dubstep tunes. Again, this music has space, it’s definitely 3D or even 4D. Too fine to do time - dreamy and mystifying female voice in a multi-textured composition with crispy synth-driven beat and ear-catching melody. Just listen to what’s going on at the front in the middle and in the background of this track. Pantyraid switch tempos, beats and drums with such an ease while at the same time producing tight and coherent journey through IDM / electronic seas. I really dig their sensitivity and touch. Like that - downtempo, head-nodding bravado with extremely glitched bassline. And this girly voice sample is totally weird, yet very warm, tempting and inviting like a strange attractor. I nearly fell in love with her. I wish I was the producer and had the appropriate vocabulary to describe all the nuances, tempo-shifts, broken rhythm and many synth layers one can hear in this composition. Finally, Our second chance. Marty Party and Ooah again showing their top-notch production skills and a wide array of instrumentation creating multi-layered sonic textures in a kind of unreal, futuristic heavy bass sonata. I could not think of a better crowning of this absolutely outstanding piece of music.
This record really grows on you. Take your time, do not run through PANTyRAiD on fast-forward. This album requires full attention of your ears and mind from the first note till the very end. I know it’s pretty difficult in the current short-attention-span era but trust my werd, the music will pay back all the efforts in beautiful and unique currency. With each listening I have been more and more enthralled and enchanted by spellbound and dreamy sonic landscapes conjured up by two skillful magicians. I have now developed a kind of music addict routine, starting my day with at least a few tracks of PANTyRAiD. Being Doctor and all, I officially prescribe The Sauce as the best mood-boosting medicine currently available on the market. Throw away your prozac pills people, you won’t need them anymore.
