Music

Confused record store clerks may now be racking out copies of this debut album alongside the soundtrack to ‘The Break-Up’, but not for much longer. Various’s generic, obfuscating name is actually that of two studio boffins from London, whose identities are as shadowy as their name is misleading. Research reveals the respective surnames of ‘Adam’ and ‘Ian’ may or may not be Phillips and Cotterell, but whoever they are, these postmodern tinkers have been recording since 2002 as Various Productions, slipping out a series of 12-inches ranging across R&B mash-ups, illbient electronica, pastoral folk, mechanico-funk and grime. Which begs the question: do Various have an admirable disregard for the personality-obsessed protocol of the record industry? Or do they just have dodgy creative pasts and are determined to disguise them?

Whatever. ‘The World Is Gone’ announces the arrival of a major new talent of Leftfield-like hitting potential. It’s a darkly suffocating and thrillingly paranoid soundtrack for the Noughties that takes its cues from Tricky’s more psychotic symphonies, but slows them right down and boots them into the present via grime’s dark, monstrously bass-heavy, monged-out, but increasingly popular sibling – dubstep.

The LP is best at its meanest and leanest: ‘Thunnk’, a killer mix of hyper low-end bass, nasty string stabs and viscous glitch with a menacing voiceover; last year’s single, ‘Hater’, which sets soulful female vocals against a pulverising, digi-dub pulse; ‘Don’t Ask’ (think Augustus Pablo trapped in a nuclear reactor with Lou Rhodes); and ‘Soho’, which summons the terrors of K-hole psychosis. It’s not all fucked-up and filthy, however: ‘Circle Of Sorrow’ is tremulous, spooked folk; ‘Today’ could be Lamb soundtracking ‘Pi’; and (rather less appealingly),
‘Sir’ and ‘Sweetness’ suggest Depeche Mode gone dubstep. Mostly, though, ‘The World Is Gone’ measures the
temper of our troubled times with fearsome surety. Apocalypse, now.