- While we await Vessel's first release on Tri Angle, which announced his signing in January, the Bristol producer returns to Throwing Snow's Left Blank imprint, which he kicked off last May with the Nylon Sunset EP. Like that record, Standard divides its time between slow house and 130 BPM territory, but the sound, this time out, is more diffuse, forsaking the percussive bite of earlier tracks like "Ton" and "Nylon Sunset."
The title track, which lopes along at a grudging 100 BPM, picks up its chug from Workshop and its crinkled high-end from Actress, beginning with plangent drones and finishing with garbled funk licks. "Merge" is a fleet-footed tribute to Moodymann, with its stacked harmonies set against a ruminative bassline and skipping hi-hats; again, there's a strange undertow that bends its arc down into the murk, as sounds modulate and drums corrode. Less than three minutes long, "Zero" is a haze of down-sampled drums and dub delay, skeletal garage smeared into an ambient scrim.
Tracklist A Standard
B1 Merge
B2 Zero