Adultnapper - Borrowed Keys

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  • Alicia Keys seems like unlikely source material for a tech house producer, but Adultnapper isn't your normal producer. Something tells me he delights in transforming such soulful and funky music into soulful and funky music of an entirely different sort. Beautiful Rhodes is replaced by buzzing, fizzing and growling; Keys voice is left naked and disembodied; liquid drums are straightened into pillars of strength. If you didn't know that 'napper had napped Keys' work for this EP, you'd be hard-pressed to hear it though. Borrowed Keys is largely business as usual: "Sissy Fuss" takes a warped key melody, and pounds out syncopated drumming over it before building to a climax which sounds a little bit like standing at the edge of a highway as cars zip by and a lonely theremin player moves their way up the pole ever so slowly. "Vase" doesn't have the same subtle moment of truth as its A-side counterpart, but the simmering menace that permeates the tune boils over for a moment late in the game. Keys voice, however discombobulated, doesn't make an appearance here and it's sorely missed. Napper corrects that on the digital bonus track, taking poor cut-up Alicia for a ride once again amid what sound like the closest that he'd ever get to the sort of tribal drum patterns favored by the Cécille/Oslo camp. True to form, though, his programming doesn't sit still, and grows with the track as it takes on a quasi-Eastern melody for good measure.
  • Tracklist
      A Sissy Fuss B Vase Digital: All These Dots
RA