Zomby - "Where Were U in '92?"

“What the fuck is this shit?” was the my initial reaction to dubstep when a friend first turned me on to it in 2006, playing Burial’s self-titled album for me.  Made up of tracks wump-wump-wump-wump bass throbbing your subs and ghost-like vocal samples, dubstep is a relatively new evolution in the ‘idm’ (intelligent dance music) genre.  While classic idm artists like Aphex Twin used glitches and breaks to get the hipsters feel a’movin’, more current dubstep artists, while still staying true to the glitch/break formula of their predecessors, are adding more wordly influences like Jamaican dancehall (where the ‘dub’ comes from) and sounds not out of place on tracks by underground hip-hop producers like the late-great J Dilla and Madlib.  The label Hyperdub, out of the United Kingdom, imprint of the aforementioned Burial, has a plethora of dubstep artists oozing out of the London and Bristol undergrounds.  One of the freshest sounds of any of these has to be that of Zomby.

After a series of 7” and 12” vinyl releases to ramp up the hype as is customary, in 2008 Zomby dropped his debut full length, “Where Were U in ’92?”  This album is good.  It’s not great, but it’s certainly very good.  The reason I say this so early on in this review is to emphasize the fact that if you have not listened to this style of music before, at first listen it can be quite abrasive (read: rave air horns echoing in and out on the majority of the tracks).  This is not to suggest that I have some sort of keen ear more attuned to the nuances of Zomby’s music any more than the next schmuck out there, rather, to the contrary, that I am just the next schmuck out there and it took me a couple of listens to really get a feel for it.

But onto the music.  The title of the album is an allusion to the UK rave culture that was burgeoning at the dawn of the 1990’s.  Zomby by all accounts, although his identity is mostly secret, was most definitely around only 6 or 7 and not participating in the scene.  So wherever he was in ’92 he almost certainly wasn’t raving.  Although he was not yet at the age of majority where he could enjoy the new culture of ecstasy poppin' and 20-somethings sucking pacifiers while dancing until dehydration, he certainly appreciates the music of the era which provide the pallet from which he paints his musical portrait. 

The album kicks off with the aptly titled, “Fuck Mixing, Lets Dance”, a breakbeat 8-bit jam full of symbol crashes and air horns.  The song is actually a relatively benign beginning to what amounts to a complex dance album.  Later on tracks like “Daft Punk Rave” Zomby samples in part of the repetitive chorus of “Harder Better Faster Stronger” and filters it through the grimey strain of the United Kingom’s best scene.  One of the standout tracks, “Tears in the Rain” hammers hard with a pulsating bass beat that never lets up and of course, the obligatory rave horns.  Other cuts like “Float” feel like mid-90’s RnB that your older sister probably got freaky to in high school.  Of course, no album paying tribute to rave culture would be complete without an ecstasy song.  Here, “Pillz” features samples asking “Is you rolling?” and responding with “Shhhhs, I might” followed by “Girl, he geeked up”.  Not exactly an original statement for anyone familiar with the thizzin’ culture of Bay Area rap, but as the song progresses you can almost feel the transition from your Nintendo playing childhood to your booze swilling early twenties when the break abruptly shifts the direction of the song.  Another that is sure to be a fan favorite is “U Are My Fantasy (Street Fighter II Theme Remix)” which is pretty much as it sounds, a remix of the Street Fighter II theme song, but it also really shows his roots in the dubstep culture.

Running at just under 40 minutes, “Where Were U In ’92?” is an enjoyable romp back in time in a glitchy, tweaked-out sort of way.  While most dubstep sounds like the future, Zomby sounds like the future sprinkled with the past.  Zomby is to dubstep, what Peanut Butter Wolf is to hip-hop, a producer mining the early 90’s for inspiration, an era most popular culture has resigned to belonging solely to Nirvana and Pearl Jam.  In any case, fuck mixing, let’s dance.

-Zach Jaffe