Album: Freq Nasty

Bring Me the Head of Freq Nasty, Skint

This second album from the expat New Zealander Darin Mcfadyen, aka Freq Nasty, is immaculately timed to ride the wave of the ascendant breaks scene. Perhaps best known for his late-Nineties classic "Boomin' Back Atcha", Nasty was one of the pioneers of breakbeat techno, mashing together the sinister synth tones of techno, the nervous energy of jungle and the elastic bounce of funk, all lashed to dramatic drum breaks. With Bring Me the Head of Freq Nasty, he adapts to absorb more recent dancefloor developments, but without losing his own essential character. The result, on a track such as the single "Come Let Me Know", is a potentially massive hit, with the rapper Rodney P running slick and smart over the abrupt, abbreviated garage twitch: "Come let me know/ If you feel the fire, if you feel the flow." But instead of repeating the formula, Nasty rings the changes between the basic acid-bassline squelch and vocoder gargle of "Fresh", the spindly techno stammer of "2 Females" and the smouldering downbeat of "Brooklyn 2 Brixton". Elsewhere, "Clit Licka" apes Lil Louis's house classic "French Kiss" with its orgasmic sighs and slowed-down/ speeded-up groove, while the tumbling keyboard cascade of "La Machina Latina" has the madcap fluency of a Gyorgy Ligeti player-piano piece, hardly your everyday club fare.