Arc Tangent

I man­aged to get my mitts on a pre-​release leak of Pendulum’s newest album, Immer­sion (iTunes link). I’m about to launch into a track-​by-​track review, pep­pered with food analo­gies — if you’re feel­ing hun­gry, I sug­gest you make a sand­wich now.

I did this inter­view simul­ta­ne­ously with @ruzkin; it might be inter­st­ing to com­pare and con­trast our reviews.

Before I begin though, I’ll dis­claim: this album is going to be dis­ap­point­ing to a lot of fans. It’s going to take a pretty broad mind to get a lot out of it, and if you’re after more of Hold Your Colour (iTunes) or In Sil­ico (iTunes again) I sug­gest you lis­ten to a few tracks first and get a feel for it before purchasing.

This is not what you’re expect­ing. It’s exper­i­men­tal. @ruzkin described it to me as “rem­i­nis­cent of early BT”. It crosses a lot of genre bound­aries and tries to cover a lot of ground. In my opin­ion, the album is fun­da­men­tally com­po­si­tion­ally flawed; the wrong tracks in the wrong place, and some that should have been left off the album alto­gether. It is by no means perfect.

I found a lot to love in it; I’m a fan of elec­tronic music in gen­eral, so I’m not wed­ded to the con­cept of Pen­du­lum as a drum’n’bass act. I wager that at least 70% of their for­mer fans won’t feel the same way.

Here we go, track by track …

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