Evolution EP – Charzrd (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Right from the off, there is something of the 90’s Rave scene about Kingdom, the opening salvo of this collection of largley instrumental dance tracks, but the way those high octane beats are balanced by wonderfully chilled dynamic lows is what marks this out as something wholly new. And as if to show that you shouldn’t judge a book by a cover, or at least an album by its opening song, Wake Me Up skitters along more ambient and chilled lines, for the most part, offering the laid back Yin to the previous full on Yang.

So with those two extremes marked out, the album is free to wander between the two taking in strange blends of trap-rave experimentation, mutant deconstructions of urban grooves and found sounds and wrapping things up with Feeling Low and its mercurial mix of dance floor beats and broken rhythms. It may start out in the neon nostalgia of rave culture past but for the most part this is the sound of Electronic Dance Music of an era still to come. A future where genres have become irrelevant and the rules are there to be ignored.