Album Review: Daniel Avery, Tremor

Plenty of musicians talk about Daniel Avery’s music in reverential terms, and with good reason. The English producer and songwriter has an original style that manages to bridge the gap between My Bloody Valentine-inspired shoegaze and more pulsating electronic music.

Tremor is a strong, urgent record. Across the 13 songs, Avery teams up with various frontmen and women, among them The Kills’ Alison Mosshart, yuné pinku, Rival Schools’ Walter Schreifels, and NewDad’s Julie Dawson.

Each vocalist acts as an ethereal foil to Avery’s industrial, sometimes claustrophobic, instrumentals, which veer from crashing metal to drum and bass. You find yourself absorbed by the heavy rock of ‘Haze’, featuring Ellie, before being sucked into the pulsating vortex of ‘A Silent Shadow’.

Many of these songs recall the trip-hop energy of Massive Attack, but there’s a cinematic edge as well; they sound like they were conceived in, and created for, late-night ravers. There’s a distorted, atmospheric griminess to songs like ‘Disturb Me’ and ‘In Keeping (Soon We’ll Be Dust)’ that gives them real character.

Overall, a terrifically adventurous collection.

8/10