Dabrye: One/Three

One/Three sees hip-hop going under the precise knife of Dabrye and emerging with a serious facelift, but with a new zest for life. Dabrye’s electronic hip-hop beatscapes are vaguely familiar yet futuristically new. Unashamedly electronic in atmosphere – his beats sound like they have been put through an industrial shredder – they went in as crisp boom-bap a la Jay Dee and came out as squelchy, metallic chrome-blip. But Dabyre injects enough warmth into his mechanistic basslines to maintain a healthy neck-snapping quotient. These are steel-encased hip-hop beatscapes that fuse the intrinsic groove of hip-hop into a warm, malleable liquid metal that IDM-ers will be proud to call their own. For example, "So Scientific" recalls an electro sensibility with its so smug title and Atari-game bleeps. Meanwhile, "I’m Missing You" reminds you of the human imagination that went into all this, with the hint of a spliced up, tweaked out vocal sample. For all its spit-polished steely grinding, One/Three never seems far from its human source, and carries with it a self-deprecating sense of humor lest we take it all too seriously. Just check out the playful "Hot Mating Ritual" for further evidence. Dabrye turns hip-hop inside out and lovingly exposes it by its sampled, drum-machined guts on this quirky, but enjoyable grower of an album.

Courtesy of BPM magazine / DJMixed.com