- A title like "Why Does Anyone Ever Do Anything?" just screams unreasonable melodrama, but we should expect nothing less from Hospital and its Med School sublabel. Welsh producer James Ellaway makes a good match for the imprint. The track lives up to the overbearing pathos of its title, with gilded strings practically swelling up in tears and fluttering synths twinkling around a delicate drum break. It makes for a bewitching bed of sound to prop up a lovely restrained vocal from Welsh singer Rachel K. Collier. "When your life stops giving / Why does anyone ever do anything?" Ouch. Well, at least the track is pretty.
Ellaway proves adept at a similarly gentle style of dubstep, and "Sky People" easily reaches the same heights. It's a sort of photonegative Kryptic Minds where the dark parts are converted into bursts of sunlight. The percussion rotates on a heavily swung arc, where the buzzing bass below feels comforting rather than foreboding. "Complete Me, Completely" is bolstered with heavier drums and barbed-wire basslines and is ultimately less distinctive, while the clicking and whirring "Asleep in Her Bed" sounds like a late-period ASC track with all the atmospheric fog removed. With his most high-profile release yet, Lung shows that, even if he's still finding his way around it, he's got a talent for making typically aggressive forms of dance music into lovelorn lullabies without driving them offroad into maudlin territory.
Tracklist A Why Does Anyone Ever Do Anything? feat. Rachel K Collier
B Sky People
Digital: Complete Me, Completely
Digital: Asleep in Her Bed