Slackk - A Little Light

Pitchfork 63

Slackk’s taken a wild route from grime mixtape archivist to R&S Records signee. It’s a discography that made his influences easily acknowledged—grime dons like Wiley and D Double E on his two-year stint on the Local Action label, or Chicago ghettotech and footwork via his releases under the alias of Patrice & Friends—but makes his next move unpredictable. Anyone willing to work out those influences alongside nods to house and ambient is willing to go anywhere, but getting it all properly focused is harder than letting that eclecticism take you wherever you feel like going.

Like last year’s Aviary EP, A Little Light takes the promise of his 2015 R&S debut EP Backwards Light and simmers down the tension to hint at more meditative things lurking below. But while Aviary was packed with a joyful bombast with earlier nu-grime and ramped up the mood to something giddy without making it feel empty, there’s not much on A Little Light that fits in either mode. The scattered chord progressions and nerve-jostling drum patterns that laced Aviary with all that promise are diluted enough that Slackk’s musical ideas feel in transition. The moments of crushing bass stand out just as often as the moments where more delicate ambience takes over, but they hardly work together.

When they do, it’s because they lay down a strong mood, which it’s pretty hard not to do when you’re oscillating somewhere between Terror Danjah bass and Aphex Twin twitchiness. Two standout cuts, the chunky jaw-clenching dub lurch of “Desert Eagle” and the halogen-and-laser glow of “Deluxe Night Edition,” hit that sweet spot between momentum and reflection by juxtaposing the kind of beats that show you just how to move with melodic hooks. It’s not complicated stuff, but the freedom to let a track either propel you or wash around you is at the core of some of Slackk’s best music.

And splitting those tendencies does a lot to sap the emotion from songs until they’re just a little ambient puzzle to tinker with or a straightforward beat to absentmindedly nod to. Opener “Spring Mist” has its own problems—a crowd-pleasing rattle of post-Neptunes drum pattern is smothered in a sort of weightless digital ocarina of twee, too precious to wild out over and too heavy on the kicks to relax to—but at least it’s a contrast. There’s a twofer in the middle of the album that points out the weaknesses of him just letting a glimmering shard of near-beatless ambient noodling ride (“So Far, the Sea”) or laying down a solid-enough beat without much of a shot to build much further over it than a distracted-sounding synth wriggle. They might stir up some attention, but there’s not much mood or feeling behind it, just a bit of churning forward motion that feels propelled by the passage of time and not much else. As pure instrumentals, a good portion of A Little Light risks feeling like a piece of eye-catching scenery in search of some occupants.

Not that Slackk’s said everything he needs to say on those first two R&S EPs. He still shows new ways for him to manipulate mood and tone without really finding a lazy comfort zone, much less falling into one. Some of the weirder little sketch-interludes he drops in an early hint at weirder ideas. “Maze” looms like some sort of space cathedral and lets off a few inside-out arpeggios and is more melodically staggering than anything else on the record, and the simple loop of groans that makes all 27 seconds of “Sefton Park West” feels simultaneously melancholy and creepy. And even when his sound’s a little more recognizable and easy to compare to his peers, it at least comes with the sense that he’s doing more than escaping into his own headspace. It’s a start—or better yet, a restart.