- Not lifting off, not sitting still, both the most serene and one of the most subtly unsettling things he's authored, Zomby's "Natalia's Song" is the first new thing he's released under his own name since the One Foot in Front of the Other mini-LP in August 2009. They just happened to be the two years when everything he set in motion, from One Foot's return to 8-bit formalism to the rave-throwback formalism of Where Were U in '92? to the blithering psychedelia of early singles like "Liquid Dancehall" and "Spliff Dub (Rustie Remix)," began to spin on its own axis.
"Spinning on its own axis" works to describe "Natalia's Song" as well. You don't typically associate this kind of dreamy pulse with Zomby, and definitely not this sort of dawn-rising slow-and-even progression-not-build. Has he been listening to Four Tet and Caribou, too? (Maybe; he is signed to 4AD.) But he makes that soft-metallic-percussive melodic weave indubitably his by fraying the timbres a little (particularly on the echoey vocal-sample daubs) and cultivating a little dry ice along the drums rather than Hebden or Snaith's sunshine. In the sense that a single is a piece of music that stands strongly on its own, I'm not sure this is all that good a single; it sounds like it will ripen with an album's context. But as a big left turn, a whetting of the appetite for what the rest of Zomby's album will sound like, "Natalia's Song" is pretty shrewd, and that has merits of its own.
TracklistA Natalia's Song