- After stripping grime to a sleek skeleton on his debut album, Signals, Wen teams up with Parris to take the same approach towards the tried-and-true Tempa sound. Caught engages with the vaunted label's history, from the moody garage that gave it its start to the classicist dubstep it pumps out these days.
"Caught" is as tightly wound as any Wen production. Balancing on needlepoint sub-stabs, it's full of clipped vocal samples and big swathes of synth that bend and break in the background. There's not one extraneous bit of sound, and the duo play a neat trick with that stillness, borrowing percussive devices from house, with bobbing hi-hats rather than the usual swung arc of dubstep and garage. The slightly slower "Collide," meanwhile, is even more subdued. It's a creeping roller in the grand tradition of Tempa (and including one of those tense spoken-word breakdowns), just slowed to a nerve-wracking crawl. These days Tempa is a label defined by tradition, but Wen & Parris have found a way to make it sound fresh all over again.
トラックリストA1 Caught
B1 Collide