Black Rose - Anthem EP

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  • It's hard to describe exactly how Black Rose's "Anthem" fails to come together, but it's easier to flip the question and ask, well, which parts of it manage to actually deliver on their promise? The puzzled silence that follows says a lot about what went wrong here. Or if not wholly wrong then certainly nowhere near really right. "Anthem" was crafted by Henrik Schwarz and Jesse Rose, two producers who know their way around some the deepest (and, truth be told, most dicey) aspects of where club music goes in search of humanism and soul. So here together they dive into reggae, with sampled vocals from Barrington Spence that have been cut up and laid over a bumptious bassline that carries everything else along. That bassline, though, plays more like a tossed-off oompah caricature than anything that might signify as reggae, and the keyboards that cycle through clipped patterns like something at a carnival don't help either. There's a ham-handedness to it all that is surprising for Schwarz and Rose, and a hokiness too. A live version on the B-side proves much better, thanks in part to some zealous dub tricks that abstract the whole thing and take the glare off the A-side's worst missteps. But "Anthem" isn't particularly fit to count as such, no matter how it's presented.
  • Tracklist
      A Anthem B Anthem (Live)
RA