Girl Unit - Club Rez EP Review

The bar's been raised high for Philip Gamble, and it's almost entirely his own doing. Back in 2010, the UK producer who works as Girl Unit followed up "IRL", his debut single for the hip cross-continental poly-dance label Night Slugs, with an absolutely massive slab of electronic mania in the form of "Wut". Simultaneously frantic and spacious, with the kind of vocal hook that both burns itself into your brain and resists simple replication, "Wut" was six-and-a-half minutes of airhorn-slathered awesomeness that made the melodic tang of purple sound positively black by comparison. It was the type of single that didn't so much top year-end lists as it did absolutely wreck anything that came close to approaching its perch.

The single sounds as relevant now as it did in 2010, its all-everything-now sonic swarm and nods to Southern hip-hop rhythmic textures found in contemporary maximalist producers, from Araabmuzik to Rustie. It doesn't seem like a stretch to say that, in another five years, either everything or nothing will sound like "Wut". The official release was backed by two accompanying cuts of Bayhem, "Every Time" and "Showstoppa", both of which sounded like Twisted Metal elevated into real-life status, with gnarled car crashes and warehouse explosions tornadoing through speaker systems. The only thing more surprising than all of the carnage Gamble was capable of creating was the silence that followed, as he essentially took from then until now as a vacation, rather than capitalize on the considerable momentum that the "Wut" single rewarded him with....full text Last week we reported that Girl Unit’s Club Rez EP will drop May 7th, and now we have the first taste of what’s coming. It’s a radio rip of the title track that’s been floating around for months, but with the announcement of this EP, his first since the world-conquering Wut in 2010, we now knew what to look for.

The new cut features an airy, bubbling arpeggio and Girl Unit’s trademark thick, emotive synths doing battle with a titchy electro-hop beat. It works as a more traditional club track than ‘Wut’, whose job mainly seemed to be to rupture time and space, but still retains elements of that track’s outsized girth and unbridled urgency....full text