Year Zero

It’s dance music’s Year Zero. Distributors, labels and mags have gone bust, and there’s a dearth of new artists. While these are troubled times, there are still producers like Slam making great electronic music. The duo’s classic dance floor sound is well represented here, with soaring, epic strings and plaintive vocals fused with moody bass undercurrents on ‘This World’, ‘Known Pleasures’ and ‘Human’.This time round, Slam also dip their toes in the seemingly disparate worlds of underground electro – the atmospheric vocals of ‘Kill The Pain’ and the firing breaks on ‘Metropolitan Cosmopolitan’ – and the bittersweet electronic pop nuances of recent single ‘Fast Line’ and Billie Ray Marin’s narrative about the evils of the music industry on ‘Bright Lights Fading’. It’s hardly a cure-all for the industry’s woes, but until the next big thing inevitably breaks, this will do very nicely.