Pendulum - In Silico is rockingly superior drum 'n' bass

Photo by wonker. 

I've made strong points before about drum 'n' bass lacking a wealth of really good artist albums — tragically, a non-trend that continues to this day. Like most dance music genres but even sparser, drum 'n' bass has grown a tree of notable singles over the years, but whole albums (which don't just dabble in the style on a couple tracks) which embrace the form and substantially shape, deform, warp it forward are frustratingly rare.

That's why I'm so happy to share that Pendulum's new album, In Silico, their first since 2005's Hold Your Colour, starts things off with the headbanging stomp of "Showdown", and ends powerfully with the live-action-anime-thrust of "The Tempest" too. Shy of 58 min., not as long a work as their 80-min. debut and hardly as collaborative. However, the tracks are, for the most part, tighter-produced and rich in melody while sacrificing none of the literally earthquaking DRUM and BASS heaviness which made them such a field success in the first place. Let's put it this way: Pendulum take what's essentially good about DnB, chop the slop and let it drop, and add special ingredients to the stew you've never tasted together before.

In Silico will definitely appall and provoke lots of guttertalk from technosnobs, and it already has. Wise words from lead singer Rob Swire about the DnB "echo chamber" aka "ideological incest":

my only real problem with dnb (which i also tried to point out with my other post but fucked it up)… is the insular thinking that sometimes pollutes every electronic scene. when people don't look outside their given genre / scene for musical inspiration, things tend to get boring and tired very quickly. the music goes in circles, repeating itself…the amount of fans never changes, new people aren't attracted to the scene to give it fresh input and shit gets stale very quickly. all the drum n bass i have really liked since i got into it sounded like it took inspiration from different places…

Well, all that spew in response can only result in more things being said about Pendulum — you know what they say about publicity — and if we were to rattle off a list of comparative features for In Silico like most tech products on the market today, it might go something like this:

• Energetic, powerful sound!
• Arrangements rich in texture!
• No boring 32-bar parts that loop mindlessly!
• Lots of somewhat cryptic lyrics!
• Beautiful, emotion-inducing moments!

Let's look at those points one by one:

Energetic, powerful sound! Pendulum refuse to let things get stale, and a lot of the tracks contain beats that pound and slam away for less than a minute before varying things up, whether it's slow-rolling into an arcrescendo punctuating the next dramatic section, or impressively breaking into half-tempo stride (like "Showdown" @ 3:10) before regaining full momentum. It sounds like an awesome hybrid of beat programming and live performance, and whatever they're doing, it's superb. Not only that, the chord progressions and harmonic developments are a lot more complex than most music of any genre you'll hear out there. Gated synth lines creep in, guitars wail behind the scenes before smashing to the forefront, and strange sound effects cue one passage into the next. Pendulum have taken big risks here by embellishing their current sound as being a mixed-raced child of artificially-divided genre camps. Like I alluded to, quite an aural feast.

Arrangements rich in texture! Whether it's referencing classic ambiences on "Different" and "Midnight Runner" (which have late-90s sheen seamlessly grafted all over them) or even more retro vibes like the vocoded, Daft-Punky vox on "Visions", Pendulum continue reaching out to what's inspired them without sounding desperate or overly derivative. There's even a warbly-LFO sample at the beginning of "Mutiny" which sounds like it could've come from the Chemical Bros.' "Music: Response" before kicking into high gear, and parts of "Propane Nightmares" sound chordwise-similar to Dune's "Million Miles From Home". Most jungle purists would shun stepping into happy hardcore, but I'm glad to see Pendulum aren't restrained by such nonsensical mindjails. I've also noticed that 3 tracks ("Different", "The Other Side", "Mutiny"), have what are essentially DnB breaks played at lower tempos, making them hard-slugging tracks well-suited for the next movie based on a Philip K. Dick work. (Incidentally, Dieselboy's new mix album, Substance D, is en eponymous nod to PKD.) I'd like to see Pendulum follow the pioneering path of another DnB maverick, Photek (Rupert Parkes), and carve out some tasty film scores.

No boring 32-bar parts that loop mindlessly! This is a downfall of most DnB. Yes, I know, not just, but it puts a lot of casual people off who might be interested, if they could just get past the intro section that's designed to be DJ-mixed, the middle section that, uh, could also be mixed but it's boring as heck, etc. Instead of straight-looping, I've long advocated adding slight rhythmic shifts, atonal stabs, and other bits to make things more engaging — and to be fair, since my personal preferences get brazenly reflected in what Pendulum's doing, that makes it all the more exciting for me.

Lots of somewhat cryptic lyrics! Every song has some degree of vocals, even if it's the brief bits in "Midnight Runner" and "9,000 Miles". I initially found this mildly contentious, because it took me awhile to warmup to Rob Swire's delivery. Depending on what effects are applied in a track, he can sound somewhat nasal or surreally nascent. I still prefer the original interpretation of "Mutiny"'s lyrics as they were intoned in the Matrixy dark steps of "The Terminal", but "Mutiny"'s punky groove draws lineage from both No Doubt's ska antics and System of a Down's politically-charged cymbalthrash. I'll emphasize that a lot of the lyrics do sound well-matched for a cyberpunk movie, or whatever they're calling it nowadays: just the right poise of fear, mystery, enclosure, and hope.

Beautiful, emotion-inducing moments! This is not something to be ashamed of if you're a real human. From prison-break flutes leading into the lively hand percussion backing the toe-tapping guitar strumming @ 2:00 of "9,000 Miles" (shades of a Pendulum's previous hit, "Hold Your Colour" from the album of the same name) to the arpeggiated organ riffage @ 3:30 of "Propane Nightmares", this is music both cinematic and celebratory. One of drum 'n' bass' kryptonites is that most tracks are "flat" in their emotional range: you either get balls-to-the-wall aggro-distortion OR mellow jazzy brush fills, but NOT both in the same span of minutes. As an AND person, I'm pleased to hear such a mature level of plotting here, and it's perhaps best illustrated, evocatively and goldenly, in all 7:26 min. of "The Tempest" (this album's analogue to Muse's "Knights of Cydonia). This basically means you can listen to the album and over and it won't get boring fast — and isn't high replay value important in a time of deprived attention spans and disposable culture?

"Tempest", my fave song on In Silico 

FINAL WORDS: if you like Prodigy's Fat of the Land or DJ Fresh's Escape from Planet Monday or Chemical Bros., Crystal Method — just about any quality "rocktronica" (labels are funny), you'll likely like In Silico very, very much. As I touched on earlier, fans of Muse's Black Holes & Revelations and devotees of other bands that've married synths + guitars (New Order and Fischerspooner wouldn't be a stretch, either) will also find a lot to cheer about about the sonic quality. The overall combination of electronic and acoustic sounds is reminiscent, as is the use of vocals soaring atop styles which historically limited themselves to shunning them (aside from the odd sampled snippet). If you've never of drum 'n' bass before, this is a fine place to start — it's accessible, rewarding, musically challenging, and perhaps most importantly, fun.

Tagged as: Audio, General, Reviews