Deeper Underground: Mount Kimbie, Crooks & Lovers.

As post-modern dubstep continues to devour itself, throwing itself back up in an entirely reassembled gunk ball that's snowballing incessantly, attracting box-fresh reversed samples and a forever greater sense of ambient instrumentation like obsessive fly suction shoots to excrement, mystique, hype and a plethora of Britain's most talented producers have been regurgitated from London's dingiest outposts and dankest guts of late. Following on from universally heralded post-dubstep EPs Maybes and Sketch On Glass that dug up the bones from a certain Burial and reconstructed them in haunting, hallucinatory sampled schizophrenia as suited to night buses as Fever Ray is to the tube network that subterraneously ties London together, Mount Kimbie instated themselves as the musical manifestation of the bleary eyed self-loathing induced by existential 4am rambles and that one can that tips you over the breathaliser's upper bound. Hence by the time any tangible debut LP were ripe enough to be plucked down from the bountiful branches of Rough Trade racks, raw anticipation would inevitably be rife. That time is now. Well, almost...

July sees the release of said debut outing, Crooks & Lovers, a luscious, expansive vacuum of ethereal whispers and lilted drum blips. Scratching the surface of dubstep without delving into the land of the prefix can be a disorientating and irresolute experience. And this duo composed of Dominic Maker and fellow knob-twiddler Kai Campos are no stranger to the odd synth squelch that the genre's come to stand for stereotypically, as Blind Night Errand purveys little of the blurred innovation we've come to expect from the pair, as menacing staccato blares cagily about the innards of your head like erratic insects. Far more enchanting are the oriental twangs of Adriatic, distinctly drawing stark comparisons to the intricate web of glistening glitch-pop spun by Gold Panda, or the Stardust sparkle of Would Know, were late nineties commercial dance compressed into three minutes of scattily organised chaos. Before I Move Off sounds a little like the audio interpretation of those effervescently acid green shoots that spurt towards sunrise on the sped up tapedecks of the BBC documentary department, whilst the hushed static swarms of Carbonated fizzle down headphone chords with greater panache than fourteen Franz Ferdinands. Ruby states a claim for the less is more theorists, with its swelling garage clacks boiling over and burning your cochlea like spaghetti worming out the pan and onto the flaming hob below, slithering onto Ode To Bear, the bassed-out blissful pinnacle of Mount Kimbie's aural output thus far. Status, hype and trip hop infusion all entirely justified; as Mayor frazzles itself out, Mount Kimbie state their claim to the top table of genre-confused dance writhing in the wake of dubstep's reconstruction.