Fracture & Neptune - Customtone

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  • Slide guitar. It's not something you normally associate with drum & bass, but then again right now drum & bass is all about the unknown. English duo Fracture & Neptune have always made lush and cinematic drum & bass rooted in all sorts of rock music (utilizing slide guitar in the past, in fact), a style nicely packaged and exhibited on their compilation Retrospect: A Decade of Fracture & Neptune. "Customtone" is the lone new track on the compilation, and it's a real doozy. Finding its palpitating heart in the punch-drunk rhythm of offbeat chords and tenacious, relentless drums, the defining feature of "Customtone" is, yes, the slide guitar that weaves and winds its way between the drum patterns. Enrobed in rich reverb, the guitar is as effective an emotive device as it is a melodic one, occupying the same middle ground between bluesy lamentation and spooky Western atmosphere that it does for post-metal bands like Earth. On the flipside is a collaboration with Chewie that feels muted in comparison even if it's similarly unconventional. "Brain Freeze" puts the funk in neurofunk, unscrewing those stuck-gear beats and throwing in growling LFO basslines that cut diagonals through the surface of the track, leaving it shorn and misshapen. When you can do that and still sound functional, you know you're doing something right.
  • Tracklist
      A Customtone feat. Martin Fieber B Brain Freeze feat. Chewie
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