Alexis Petridis's album of the weekMusicReview(XL Recordings)
Knitting garage with techno and chopped-up vocals, the pounding yet poppy debut album from Monmouth brothers Ed and Tom Russell is masterfully done
Overmono take their name from a suburb of their Welsh home town. You could take that as a knowing joke from a duo steeped in wilfully urban-sounding music, who specifically intended their celebrated 2021 Fabric Presents mix to evoke a winter’s night in south London. The idea of the authors of So U Kno, the reliably party-starting anthem that soundtracked the return of clubs and festivals after lockdown, naming themselves after a rural Welsh faubourg where, one assumes, there’s not much in the way of nightlife, is the dance music equivalent of a death metal band naming themselves Bourton-on-the-Water, or an anarchist punk collective called Little Missenden.
Or perhaps not. The Russell brothers only started working together after they had established themselves as producers in their own right: Tom as Truss, making punishing techno that found a home on Perc’s hard-edged Perc Trax label; Ed as the breakbeat-fuelled Tessela, his 2013 single Hackney Parrot the kind of undeniable tune that effortlessly crosses between scenes, a hit at grime nights and house clubs alike. But the music they make together seems weirdly informed by their rural roots. A decade older than his brother, Tom grew up on 90s mixtapes from Fantazia and World Dance, in an era when the music at those raves had split into two factions: jungle on one hand and the relentless four-four kick of happy hardcore on the other. But in a pre-internet age, Monmouth was apparently so far removed from the action as to render that factionalism – or any of the other boundaries that sprang up in 90s dance music – meaningless. “We didn’t have any ideas about where the music was from or how it was it made,” Tom told an interviewer last year: locally, all dance music was known by the catch-all title “rave”. Existing on a diet of records scrounged from his brother, or listening to him DJ through the wall, Ed was further removed still.
Clearly the pair cling to that prelapsarian, ignorance-is-bliss mindset. You could hear it in their Fabric Presents mix, which created an impressively linear and lucid whole out of eclectic ingredients: old jungle anthems next to banging 3am techno and 2-step garage, Jamaican dancehall crew Equiknoxx alongside Ed Rush and Optical. And you can hear something similar in the sound of their debut album. Unlike their 2022 EP Cash Romantic – which lurched, pleasingly, between drum’n’bass, electronic abstraction, 2-step and the trance-influenced Gunk in 20 minutes – Good Lies doesn’t veer dramatically between sub-genres. Instead, it builds on the blueprint laid out on So U Kno – included here and still sounding incredibly fresh, its potency undimmed by its dancefloor ubiquity – distilling their wide-ranging tastes into a coherent sound that subtly incorporates a panoply of inspiration.
The most obvious influence is garage. Cleverly warped, infuriatingly catchy vocal samples – from sources including alternative singer-songwriter Tirzah, rapper Slowthai and British Algerian soul singer Miraa May – litter the album. As on So U Kno, 2-step beats fuel Is U and Calling Out: the trademark skip of their rhythm also seems to infect the breakbeat on the title track, the downtempo Walk Thru Water and the four-to-the-floor pulse of Calon. But there’s something about the beats Overmono use – a combination of distortion and ferocious punch – that seems rooted not in garage but the tougher end of techno, a genre you can also hear echoed elsewhere: the metallic quality of the bass on Is U, the explosion of noise that erupts midway through Cold Blooded, the increasingly fierce acid line that overpowers Sugarrushhh.
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The atmosphere is frequently brooding and foreboding – like Burial, Overmono are good at setting a snatch of R&B vocal against a background that leaves it sounding ineffably melancholy – but it’s tempered by a melodicism so rich you’d be frankly amazed if pop A&R men, keen to avail their charges of a little edge, aren’t on the phone enquiring after Overmono’s availability within hours of the album’s release. Nor, as the title of Sugarrushhh suggests, are they afraid of rave-y uplift. Dramatic, trance-y synth stabs weave through closer Calling Out. About three minutes in, the beats drop out and the track takes on the quality of a hands-in-the-air breakdown. Something that sounds like a drum roll appears, but rather than kicking back in, it slowly dissolves: a euphoric drop, intriguingly twisted to Overmono’s own ends.
A consistent album rather than a collection of tracks – or worse, a handful of big tunes padded out to album length with filler – Good Lies is filled with moments like that: you can spot the influences, but they’re always passed though a filter, presented in an original way. Perhaps that’s what happens if you spend your youth hearing dance music from a distance: you develop your own unique take on it by default.
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