Joker – The Vision
4AD
Joker breathes rarefied air with big indie labels nowadays. Yes, he is among a chosen few to have emerged from grime and dubstep’s murky depths onto a commonly-acceptable surface such as 4AD. But it’s not completely obvious why, just yet.
The raw, “purple” sound Joker dreamt up in Bristol four years back is smeared all over his debut full-length, The Vision. Those unsubtle 2-bit synth vamps, the simplistic grime samples, that all-too-familiar dubstep plod, are carried over from roots producing alongside his equally purple peers, Guido and Gemmy.
The three of them won plaudits in 2007-08 for the youthful exuberance of their melodies, nonetheless drenched in cartoon-gangster seediness. They also gained traction on UK dancefloors, where Joker’s deliberately durr-brained grime riffs come off best: 2009’s ‘Purple City’ was a stunning example.
Such brashness is one of the best things about The Vision, an album unified by a familiar sound world, but ironically, lacking a singular vision. Love or hate the proliferation of so-called popstep, it appears to have given Joker an identity crisis.
Half the songs feature uber-compressed vocalists; some pure pop, some grime. Pop songs such as ‘Slaughterhouse’ are almost embarrassingly inconsistent with Joker’s previous output. It may have worked for Magnetic Man, but here, they sound derivative and vapid. Similarly trite is the more R&B-inclined title track, which shares with popstep its mix of tuneful chorus and more off-key, spasmodic verses. Overall, the recipe comes across as tired already.
But there are also moments of unabashed brilliance, starting with the intro, where a Vangelis-warm soundscape helps us remember that Joker can get a synth to sing with more feeling than he coaxes from a vocalist. On ‘Milky Way’, which comes over as a searing riposte to the fashionable melancholy of James Blake or Mount Kimbie. Here, beaming synths become a percussive force of their own, even if the breakdowns ending in double-speed kick-drum attacks are slightly predictable.
Joker’s nostalgia for Sega consoles is sonically expounded on ‘Level 6’, a bouncy interlude that is deliberately naïve but feels underdeveloped. ‘My Trance Girl’ is quite the opposite, giving voice to a love of unbridled, grimey bass that has the single-mindedness of scrawling drum’n’bass. It also, sensibly, has little to do with the disgraced genre alluded to in its title.
‘Lost’ is a smart grime tune, worthy of grandees such as Starkey. It has proper pop production, with a satisfying variety of textures, and a natural songwriting grasp that was bafflingly absent from ‘Slaughterhouse’.
All in all, The Vision is obscured by a lack of focus; blunted by a stupid fixation on the mainstream. Yet it has its purple patches, and therefore gives us enough bangers to make it a worthwhile debut. Nick Johnstone
