- Come the end of 2018 and the man in caps, LUCIANBLOMKAMP, delivers the third installment of his third LP, Sick Of What I Don’t Understand. Whatever else you might take away from his music and his marketing, splitting the impact of a full-length into three EPs, drip-fed to the world, must indicate he’s got a lot of confidence that what he’s got, is worth hearing.
The name of the record keeps nagging at me, what does he mean? A little cryptically BLOMKAMP has spoken of it as a reference to ‘difficult personal transformations.’ It sounds like it could be a slogan for the alt-right: back to the past! Reject everything different and new. That rather unpleasant connotation has a small amount of resonance with BLOMKAMP’s work. He’s always seeded his production with echoes of the past. His dark downtempo has a particularly nostalgic connection to triphop and in particular Robert Del Naja’s beloved beats for Massive Attack. This was indulged -maybe even acknowledged, almost like a disclaimer, because it was such a direct lift from the Bristol trio’s classic Teardrop- in the warm, analogue echo of Crawling which came out on the first EP’s worth of the record.
At the same time, despite drawing on the sounds of yesteryear -and who doesn’t?- BLOMKAMP is adventurous in his travels through musical history. Every time he’s put out a record there’s been something you won’t have heard before. 2016’s Bad Faith bubbled over with experimental sounds: from dark ambient to synthfolk, many strange new rhythms and -always- the evidence of a restless mind: reworking, refining and revitalising it’s approach.
You’ll hear some of that again on the new LP. One of the most obvious old-but-new avenues are the drum’n’bass beats. BLOMKAMP has always been a fan of angular syncopation and has been spicing up his slower fare with more pacey productions for some time. It’s almost a natural (backwards) progression for him to start suturing the sounds of Britain in the ‘90s into his more contemporary bass music. You can already hear it as the back half of Crawling takes off and it’s the main game in Still No, an appropriate background for a collaboration with the MCing of Trim from British grime mainstays Roll Deep Crew.
A significant portion of the sound of Sick is governed by the large number of collaborators BLOMKAMP has brought in, at least as much as the choice of beats. There’s a substantial quantity of dark r’n’b, crooned by the likes of Rromarin, Jace XL or Eliott. If Jace’s soulful contribution on Black Dove speaks to BLOMKAMP’s enduring interest in the sound of James Blake, the sound of the other two seems to have much more in common with British r’n’b diva Banks. It’s interesting to note that Lucian has done a small amount of work with her, perhaps he’s looking for local talent to recreate the experience? If so it’s working just fine: Rromarin’s moody cut, Nothing, has the mannered poise of both Banks and also The Knife and Eliott’s more fiery contribution bonds her voice to more of those drum’n’bass beats; it’s a bit electrifying.
Unusually for such a guest-heavy record, not a single one of them misfires. Even Lucian’s own vocals seem to have upped their game to a level not previously heard. Listening to him duetting with his partner Rosebud Leach on recent single Control Together sounds like a less-bored version of The xx and that sounds good. On that number, when BLOMKAMP croons “You’ve already got me twisted / Stuck and I don’t even mind it / You might think that I am slipping / But I don’t need anyone but you.” This doesn’t sound like a difficult personal transformation so much as it sounds like the right one. That’s the feel of the whole LP: confident and in control. If LUCIANBLOMKAMP is sick of what he doesn’t understand he’s responded by facing it down: taking charge with grace and skill. Every moment that has led up to now has been transformed into his finest LP to date.
- Chris Cobcroft.