ALWAYS EVERYTHING

GIRL UNIT // WUT

Oh man, another one…

It feels like we’ve been throwing around ‘… of the year!’ statements an awful lot lately, which I suppose is testament to the amount of great music being made at the moment. In just the last couple of months we’ve had an endless stream of material from Ramadanman, Jam City’s ‘Ecstasy Refix’, Hyetal’s ‘Phoenix’, his collaborative 12” with Peverelist and the murky funk of Elgato’s Hessle debut all vying for the top spot. And now Girl Unit’s dubplate cluster bomb ‘Wut’ finally arrives and immediately throws itself into the fray, all guns blazing.

Alongside Hyetal’s recent material, ‘Wut’ feels like another logical extension of post-garage music’s ongoing synth fixation, packing every space with as much artificial sound as physically possible, lest the effect be anything other than disorienting. But that doesn’t  do an awful lot of justice to quite how massive it actually sounds, even bursting from a small pair of speakers. Though ‘IRL’ was justifiably overplayed, its dissonant 808 flurries sound positively underdeveloped by comparison, perfectly functional, but little else. Every time ‘Wut’ has found its way onto a floor in the last few months, the effect has been something similar to Kode9’s description of Joker’s earliest music – “group electrification”.



Beyond their immediate charms though, all three tracks on the Wut 12” tap very directly into the spaces we love to inhabit here at AE, exploring a subliminal region between different sounds to dizzying effect. In that sense Girl Unit’s music is almost entirely genre-less; if you had to pinpoint it, it’d probably be easiest to say ‘house’, but there’s so much going on it’s difficult to reduce it to that. The juke/footwork influence is still prevalent in the skittering drum hits that skate across its surface, and the halfstepped groove of dubstep propels it on the dancefloor, but the horror show gothic of ‘Every Time’ could almost be a sharply focused cousin to the druggy resonance of Salem’s King Night album, complete with a shredded, utterly fucked up vocal refrain. ‘Showstoppa’ detonates like grime, but rides a smoother, glassy rhythm until it gradually dissociates. And underpinning all three are loping, rolling grooves that betray a love for dirty south hip-hop, loose-limbed, sleaze-ridden and smokey.

There has been a lot of praise for the Night Slugs label this year, a fair proportion of which has been justified. Its output has been patchy, sure, but its heights have counted among 2010’s best – Mosca’s bass odyssey ‘Nike’; the cyclical buzz of Jam City’s ‘Ecstasy Refix’; now ‘Wut’ and its two companions. There’s a feeling on dancefloors at the moment that dubstep’s offspring are perhaps beginning to spread too thinly, perhaps losing a level of focus and coherence that was still very much present a year ago. It’s too early to say where it’ll coalesce next, but it’s still great to hear individual tracks that shine like beacons, daring others to follow.

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Rory