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 …

Gen­e­sis
Okay. Book­end. We’re get­ting started. Oh, Gen­e­sis, the begin­ning, I see what you did there. That said, some classy chiptune-​y action up in this track. Okay warm up, for­get­table com­pared to Prelude…

Salt In The Wounds
To my ears, this track was just over­bear­ing. SiTW is heavy and hard right from the get go — sat­is­fy­ing amounts of bass if you have the right speaker stack for it. Oh, you don’t have a speaker stack? Hrm. You’re prob­a­bly not going to get full value from this one then.

By about the mid­way mark, I was find­ing Salt In The Wounds repet­i­tive and unin­spired. Even the break­down was much of a much­ness, albeit pitched up a lit­tle. And then it keeps going. And going. And going.

It’s def­i­nitely drum’n’bass, and I can see this being a good track for clubs, but when I’m lis­ten­ing to the whole album it just doesn’t sit well; I was expect­ing an entrée and I was given a kilo­gram of beef steak. It’s too much, too soon.

Water­colour
Now this.
THIS.
This is what I expect from Pen­du­lum.
The first track I heard from the new album (via their web­site), Water­colour does not dis­ap­point. A gen­tle, nature-​sound intro­duc­tion rapidly breaks down into intense, melodic drums, dri­ven vocals and tasty, tasty synth.

This track is… it is deli­cious. Pure and unadul­ter­ated Pen­du­lum, it’s a rich lasagne of sound, drip­ping with deli­cious sauce. If you like noth­ing else on this album, I’m quite cer­tain you’ll like Watercolour.

Set Me On Fire
We’re back to the heavy d’n’b stylings here, but I much pre­fer this to Salt In The Wounds. Set Me On Fire has no pre­ten­sions about what it is — jun­gle beat, over the top synth, vocals — it’s drum and bass for the drum and bass set.

The vocals get a bit repet­i­tive, but that kinda goes with the ter­ri­tory. I can’t say I love Set Me On Fire — it’s no Hold Your Colour — but I can def­i­nitely see myself stomp­ing to it at Wob­ble. That’s about the best that can be said for it though.

Rat­ing: antipasto. Some meat to it, but not enough to satisfy.

Crush
Total break from Set Me On Fire — the tran­si­tion is jar­ring. What’s hap­pen­ing?
Then.
OH MY GOD.
Hello.

The drums are solid, if a bit staid. The synth line is engag­ing. The gui­tar line… oh yeah. That hit the spot. The vocals grabbed me by the ears, hard. Rob Swire’s vocal work has really come a long way; he seems much more ver­sa­tile, and much more con­fi­dent. This track really gives him a chance to show it off.

Def­i­nitely one of my favourites on the new album; it’s a slightly dif­fer­ent sound for Pen­du­lum, but more of an evo­lu­tion than a rev­o­lu­tion. Between Water­colour and Crush you at least have a taste of Pendulum’s origins.

Under The Waves
Starts out a bit slow — the bass line was a bit unin­spired. In fact, many musi­cal ele­ments of this track are staid on their own, but the over­all com­po­si­tion fuses them into some­thing greater than the sum of their parts.

The vocals, again, are a step up for Pen­du­lum. You can really feel the results of their effort to play more live instru­ments — they sound more like a live band, and less like a dig­i­tal com­po­si­tion band. (Not that there’s any­thing wrong with that, but for my money, the ana­log sound gives a bit more vibrancy).

This track has con­sis­tently been lodged in my head. Some­thing about it just gets lodged deep down, and I find myself hum­ming bits of it as I work.

Immu­nize
Oh dear.
Oh dear oh dear.
Crush and Under The Waves were a double-​whammy of catchy melodies and rad vocals, and then we have Immunize.

Would you like some bass with your track?

It’s an ener­getic track, but it falls flat. There same loops are used over and over with lit­tle vari­a­tion; the vocals are unin­spired (to the point of being actively, brain-​cell-​reducingly bor­ing). You might use this track in a videogame some­where, maybe a rac­ing game. Peo­ple who like rac­ing games tend to like rep­e­ti­tion (yeah, I’m look­ing at you, Gran Tourismo play­ers — seri­ously, endurance races? 3–4 hours in front of the TV on the SAME fuck­ing track?)

Maybe sam­ples from it can be used in a fight scene. It’s got that kind of vibe. I can see Nicholas Cage wack­ily beat­ing fools down to this tune.

The Island — Pt. I (Dawn)
Wait. What?
What’s hap­pen­ing here? It’s a 4×4 beat… it should be bor­ing… but… just when you think Pen­du­lum have played their hand and run out of tricks, they shake it up by throw­ing what I can only describe as a trance track at you.

Yes. A trance track.

Die-​hard fans are going to be so full of hate.

With this track, Pen­du­lum take a page from the balearic trance school and pro­duce some­thing that would not be out of place on Armin Van Buuren’s A State of Trance. A beau­ti­ful melody over the top of a bor­der­line cheesy beat with lyrics so uplift­ing they could make a depressed man hug a tree.

There’s some­thing hap­pen­ing with this track; Pen­du­lum are expand­ing their hori­zons. This was the track that made me realise that I couldn’t come to this album with bag­gage. It’s exper­i­men­tal, it’s dif­fer­ent, it’s push­ing some bound­aries. Think back to Hold Your Colour, and some of the sam­ples used on Stream­line. This is, I sus­pect, what they were talk­ing about. Pen­du­lum don’t care about your gen­res, they’re mak­ing music that they want to make.

The Island — Pt. II (Dusk)

This is really still part of the first track. Except it isn’t. They’re dawn and dusk, two sides of the same coin. You can lis­ten to Pt I in the morn­ing, when you wake up, but Pt II is party time. PARTY TIME.

The cheesy trance of Pt I is taken to the extreme in Pt II, and com­pletely shaken the hell up. For my money, Pen­du­lum show up some of the trance pro­duc­ers out there who’ve been in their genre for a lot longer. It’s a bril­liant fusion of the lads’ aggres­sive electro-rock-d’n’b ori­gins and trance.

It’s pos­i­tively drip­ping with cheese. It’s dirty. It’s aggres­sive. It’s fuck­ing RAD.

This is the pay­off for this double-​part track, and it’s 100% worth it. You’ll be lis­ten­ing to this on head­phones on a tram, and you’ll start to shuf­fle your feet. You’ll bop along to it at work. You’ll hear it at a night­club and go apeshit.

It’s def­i­nitely not what you’ve come to expect from Pen­du­lum — but then, In Sil­ico was very dif­fer­ent to Hold Your Colour. These lads do some­thing dif­fer­ent with every album, and if you expect the same old same old out of them every time you’re always going to be disappointed.

If you come in with an open mind, how­ever, these two tracks alone will reward you.

Com­prachicos
Huh? Who invited Trent Reznor to this party!?

We’ve gone from cheesy-​but-​rad-​4x4 trance to what sounds like a dance remix of a Nine Inch Nails crescendo. It’s def­i­nitely some­thing new for Pen­du­lum. The gui­tar riff is dirty, but the bass line is defi­antly In Silico-​esque. Swire’s vocals are about half way between NIN and Pendulum.

Does it work? Well, it doesn’t *not* work, but it sounds out of place, espe­cially after the amaz­ing mid-​point that was The Island. If it was a track unto itself it would be hailed as a good fusion of two related but dis­tinct genres.

The Vul­ture
Track 11 is a homage to new-​school Prodigy. This track would not sound out of place on Invaders Must Die (mmm, maybe slightly ear­lier Prodigy than that, in hind­sight). That’s not nec­es­sar­ily a crit­i­cism! It’s catchy, if a bit repet­i­tive; like Prodigy’s more recent work, some of the vocals are dis­torted to the point of being impenetrable.

It’s weird, but Pen­du­lum almost do Prodigy bet­ter than Prodigy themselves.

Tech­ni­cally there’s some inter­est­ing stuff going on. The lev­els on some sam­ples are mod­u­lated in inter­est­ing ways to cre­ate a sense of ten­sion and move­ment, and the bass is rich enough to carry it.

Some­how, though, it’s just not up to snuff. I don’t hate this track, but I don’t love it.

Witch­craft
A vocally strong start to a track that I pre­dict will be one of the most divi­sive on the album.

The sud­den break at 0:45 is just bril­liant — we go from a slow rock song to some­thing more aggres­sive and pow­er­ful. When the bass line drops in, it’s deli­cious, gooey but­ter for the ears.

The vocals seem like they were inspired by Michael Jackson’s clas­sic, Smooth Crim­i­nal. There’s a the­matic cor­re­la­tion there that almost seems inten­tional — there’s even a musi­cal similarity.

Per­son­ally I love this track. The bridges are excel­lent breaks in the sound, akin to the use of silence in a move or tele­vi­sion series (hard to accom­plish on an album so full of sound). There’s a sense of inescapable fear and action to the track.

I wager a lot of peo­ple won’t like it. Screw those hippies.

Self vs Self (Ft. In Flames)
Meh. That is, unfor­tu­nately, my feel­ing on a track that clearly took some work to com­pose. There’s a lot going on here. In con­trast to Under The Waves, indi­vid­ual ele­ments are com­plex and inter­est­ing alone, but the sum of their parts is lacking.

I must admit, I don’t care much for metal, and this track is (duh) pretty metal. This is prob­a­bly the most dis­ap­point­ing track on the album for me, and I’d would’ve been quite happy if it had been left off.

I take no plea­sure in say­ing this, but: skip it.

The Foun­tain
Mmm­m­mmm. It’s not bad, it’s just not great.

There’s an In Silico-​esque vibe to this track, but it just doesn’t come together. Rock sound with elec­tronic d’n’b deliv­ery; synth is a repet­i­tive, the vocals don’t quite res­onate (despite solid deliv­ery). The bass line is unimaginative.

It’s a lot more chilled out after Self vs Self, and I think that colours the expe­ri­ence of the track — like I said at the start of this review, I believe this album to be fun­da­men­tally com­po­si­tion­ally flawed.

You can lis­ten to it. You might even enjoy it, but it won’t get stuck in your head. It’s not a track that Pen­du­lum will be remem­bered for. A bit of a whim­per for the album to end on.

Encoder
Except it’s not quite ended!

Encoder is more in the vein of The Island than any­thing else on the album. There’s a bit of an 80s vibe going on, and despite my usual dis­dain for the 80s, I don’t hate it. The bass has a cer­tain calypso beach, sum­mer with a daiquiri feel to it — but it’s not a happy, relaxed song. The con­trast of the sound and the themes will be jar­ring to some.

There’s an emo­tion to this track that’s hard to express, but I know it well. It’s a song of end­ing — “it’s over /​we’re out of time /​delete me /​I’m on your side!” A strong yet sad good­bye, fond wishes and regret­ful farewell.

The break­down and synth line at 2:48 is catchy. The track evokes The Tem­pest, but it’s more upbeat and poppy. It’s def­i­nitely NOT The Tem­pest though; it lacks the fire of that par­tic­u­lar track (to the point of being dis­ap­point­ing by com­par­i­son — Tem­pest was an absolute high­light of In Silico).

Encoder ends the album with the gen­tle sounds of the album lap­ping on rocks (or pos­si­bly a jetty or wharf — believe me, if you spent time as a kid near a jetty, you can just hear the dif­fer­ence between water on rocks and water on a round chunk of wood. Weird, but there it is.)

Sum­mary
So. I enjoyed it. You might not. I’m hear­ing word from a lot of peo­ple that there is a sub­set of the pop­u­la­tion going ape over this album, so it might be that it’s more pop­u­lar than I expect.

For some bonus lulz, here’s Pen­du­lum doing the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Comis­sion (ABC) News theme.