Send "SBTRKT " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Guardian |
 It's pronounced "subtract", which is the name this south London producer goes by, preferring anonymity lest anything detract from his music. If only it were more distinctive. His debut album is a bang-up-to-date summary of where British electronic music is at post-dubstep and the xx winning the Mercury prize, which is to say it's entered its coffee-table phase. So while there's a roster of guest vocalists and an emphasis on tasteful songwriting, it's all too smooth, lacking the reckless thrill of the audacious remixes of tracks by Radiohead and Goldie with which he first attracted attention....full text |
| Avclub |
| After a couple years of incessant gigging and social networking, South London DJ SBTRKT (né Aaron Jerome) is—at least for the next couple weeks—the preeminent export from the ever-mutating hype nebula that is UK bass culture. In terms of his countrymen and contemporaries, his first full-length SBTRKT splits the difference between the pensive experimentalism of James Blake’s eponymous debut and the more showy soulfulness of Jamie Woon’s Mirrorwriting. In other words, Jerome is a smart sound sculptor with a desire to make pop. For the most part, he succeeds, hybridizing recent ultra-hip British dance music—2-step, garage, dubstep—with an auteur’s touch. Unlike Blake and Woon, Jerome doesn’t sing, but he smartly recruits vocalists to give his compositions personality and depth. The results are music made for both a night at the club and the lonely train ride home afterward. The rapid pulse of “Trials Of The Past” is offset by a plaintive croon from London singer Sampha, and the low, sour synth-line that periodically howls past it. Sampha appears on more than a third of SBTRKT, and his caramel voice colors the record almost as much as Jerome’s production. Yet it’s a tribute to the rising producer that Sampha gives way to two female vocalists for the album’s best moments. Jerome casts the keening vocal of Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano in rubbery R&B vibes on the standout “Wildfire,” this year’s choice to unite (or irritate) indie-rock kids and club rats like Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness Is The Move” did two years ago. “Pharaohs,” starring freelance diva Roses Gabor, is a spritzy dose of early-’90s house-pop that peps up the album’s second half. There might not be anything on SBTRKT to bowl people over like Woon or Blake, but there’s plenty to stick with after the next big thing comes along....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| The debut full-length from UK producer SBTRKT comes as a bit of a surprise. Up until now we knew him mostly for some high-profile remixes and his original, instrumental tracks, which were solid but nothing to flip out over. He was loosely dubstep in the way, say, Floating Points is, using the genre as a rough guide but also weaving in several other strains of contemporary bass music. But with this self-titled LP, SBTRKT is something different: Recruiting guest vocalists to sing over his arrangements, he's working more as a traditional producer, and his music, while still grounded in experimental bass, is inching much closer toward pop. You might call what SBTRKT is doing here "post-dubstep". That's not a totally accurate term (for one, he's building off more than just that one genre), but his approach is certainly similar to what guys like James Blake and Jamie Woon have been up to in the last year or so. The central differences here are that a) SBTRKT doesn't sing himself (he's brought in vocalists Sampha, Jessie Ware, Roses Gabor, and Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano for that); and b) his music is more immediate than both Blake's and Woon's. Rather than go for showy, scene-stealing productions, he keeps things tight and purposeful: The focus is on the overall song and the vocal, and beats are just one part of that equation. The record pits some emotive and occasionally downcast singing against arrangements that throb nicely, and there's a good sense of balance and variety throughout. First single "Wildfire", for example, is a squelchy, Timbaland-like pop moment, where "Trials of the Past" is spooky and slower-paced. The reason the tracks work individually and as a whole is that SBTRKT has a keen sense of how to draw the most out of his guest vocalists. UK singer Sampha, who is featured heavily on the LP, has a warm, higher-range croon that seems built for R&B, and SBTRKT arranges accordingly, giving him stuttery tracks that draw from American urban pop and smoothed-out drum'n'bass....full text |
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