Downtempo, grime, UK garage, pop; hits from the 80s, 90s, and today: It almost sounds like a tagline for the everyman, everygenre local radio station in hometowns across the planet, but all these influences and more are blended masterfully on this highly listenable release from Anz.
Opening with twinkling piano and an acidey-bass emerging from shining pads, the track has a retro, Atari game synthetic flair. It glides seamlessly and joyously into the soulful pop of “You Could Be”, a dangerously catchy pop song that most universal emotion: desire; with a tough as nails bassline that is coated in confectioners sugar yet somehow not out of place on this album otherwise packed with old school rave, garage, and hip hop references. A cool glitchy funk descends, detuned and warbling pads drifting like steam on top of an ultra cool hat and snare line that drifts just close enough to UK garage production that it allows the release to steer itself in another direction; and it’s not the direction you might expect. A broken kick and then a synth line that would not be unwelcome in one of those modern minimalistic electronic releases joins the fray, and at this point it’s a purely enjoyable genre fusion.
Much is said of the Detroit-Berlin axis, but Detroit was the axel of a wheel with spokes in every direction, and a major one was in Manchester, where the rave scene in the 90’s evolved on it’s own terrain. Something like “Inna Circle” is a great representative of this diaspora, It’s a perfect background track for an insane breakdancing montage say, but with expert little touches of electronic drama, the echo delayed voice calling for pure anarchy, the bursts of rave breaks.
Somehow, it all works, the release flows with seaming effortlessness from one influence to the next while somehow avoiding any kind of jarring tonal shifts. The airyness is back, paired with bouncy, dancefloor reviving energy in the penultimate track, which feels like the bleary total peace experienced as the pink dawn rises on a Sunday morning. This continues into the outro, a wistful synthwave ebb that sounds like how the cover looks: optimistic and bright. “You can’t stop me now,” a squirrel-pitched voice declares as viscous warbles of synth bubble up from the dew. Hopefully, there will be no stopping Anz; and we can look forward to many more such nostalgia-fueled experimentations to come in the future.
-Winston Mann
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