Axel Bartsch feat. Jake the Rapper - Blam and Flow

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  • Don't be scared off by the title: There's but the faintest whiff of a Run DMC / Jason Nevins genre-fusion here. Sportclub boss Axel Bartsch is in typically tight tech-house form, and Jake's laconic drawl hardly warrants the "rapper" tag, cute as the pun may be. Rather, it's somewhere between basso deep house preachapella and pitched-down drugged-up mnml babble, given varied spotlight in the three takes of "Blam and Flow" found here. Bartsch's Hunt version is the most streamlined, and least memorable, stuttered blips and shuffling bongos accompanying Jake's "I am the wolf / I am the lamb" call and response which may rile those at the Brooklyn label. By contrast, the All the Beast version beefs the tones into rotund balls, adds a strong melodic loop and skips merrily along like a buoyant Sascha Funke or Anja Schneider number. Jake's words start out as clipped and processed gasps, building into a portentous probe into "hunting" habits, all played out against ever tweaked and jagged synths. Pleasing as this is, Thomas Schumacher's remix is thrillingly tense, relying on scattered traces of the vocal over a red-raw Pan Sonic-esque rhythm. After an introductory stanza Jake's rhymes are left as processing fodder, Schumacher smearing the most sibilant phonemes into harsh tracers, and shrouding others in dank echo. The drums just pound louder—weird, wonderful stuff. Bartsch's digital-only "Cuarenta y Tres Con Lecce" is no filler either, built from casebook minimal parts—rolling sub bass, scalpel-blade synths and tinny drum parts—which are nonetheless crafted into an engagingly gloomy whole.
  • Tracklist
      A Blam and Flow (Hunt Version) B1 Blam and Flow (All the Beast Version) B2 Blam and Flow (Thomas Schumacher Version) Digital: Cuarenta y Tres Con Lecce
RA