Nu Breed 5
As the world of house music slowly expands to include styles beyond its boys 'n' decks caste, British-born, globe-trekking DJ Lee Burridge mightily shows his skills as genre-buster on this double CD. It's hard to pin down the exact points in style that have landed Burridge as a progressive house star, but his fondness for tracks rife with ambient drones, popping breakbeats, house hypnotics, humorous spoken-word snippets, and acid house saturation help define his sound. Burridge just has damn good taste in tracks.Nubreedtakes off withMarshall Jefferson's "Mushrooms" (which discusses the joys of natural psychedelics), leading into the disc's rather monotonous thoroughfare of repetitive groove and unfortunately bland styles.Photek's sideways-slamming "Glamourama" adds a bit of alien intrigue, whileAxus's "When I Fall," with its stabs of ominous-sounding synth, has an intriguing darkness to it. But mostly, the first disc is on hold.The second disc ups the ante, offering deeper, more freakish sounds atop butt-flexing beats. "Are you shitting me?" someone asks in the swirling Moroccan fantasy of John Delirious's "Orange Eyes" as beats recoil like snake charmers on parade. The liquid breakbeats of Leroj's echoing "Stickman" are like airborne sonic booms panning in larger-than-life stereo. Percussion plays a big role, and Burridge favors hard-ricocheting tracks in his trademark mixes. A woman hollers, "Let me go, you bastard, let me go!" in Wally Lopez's schizo "Patricia Never Leaves the House," a wonderfully weird blend of vocal manipulation and wave-crashing beats and sounds. The set ends with Plantastic's "Artifacts," which brings it back home with a militaristic house beat, swooping hi-hats, robot hand-claps, and a "Tubular Bells"-worthy keyboard riff. For shaking up the scene,Nubreedis a breed apart.--Ken Micallef