Leon Smart's debut for Hyperdub offers an approach to dance music that looks askew, glances awry, and always moves out of kilter.
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You couldn't accuse Leon "Scratcha DVA" Smart of not making his case plain. From the title inward, Pretty Ugly, Smart's debut album for Hyperdub, wears its polemical heart on its sleeve, offering a manifesto for an approach to dance music that looks askew, glances awry, and always moves out of kilter. This approach was present in Smart's earlier work in the UK funky field, already a sub-genre that self-defines by how much it can subvert the rhythmic template of house. Perhaps influenced by his background in grime, Smart took this perversity to extremes-- see the half-step razzmatazz of 2008's "Hard House" or the alien samba of 2009's "Jelly Roll"-- pushing UK funky's twisted rhythm-sculptures to breaking point, and challenging dancers to keep moving by constantly tripping their feet.
Pretty Ugly's first single "Just Vybe" expressed the idea perfectly, its waterlogged tabla percussion sounding like living fish flipping fitfully on a frying pan while R&B singer Fatima struggles valiantly to hold everything together. The valiant struggle is itself the charm, offering the tense thrill of riding so close to the edge of where everything really will fall apart. The balance of Pretty Ugly pushes further still: beats that stutter without cohering, woozy Moog-like synth runs, soulful vocalists carefully stepping around any melody which might turn into a hook. On the brief, sketchy R&B of "Why U Do", diva AL catches her dude cheating on her in their bedroom, only (wait for it) with another man: It's an unexpectedly blunt thematic literalization of Smart's self-consciously subversive modus operandi.
Clearly, this is not a UK funky album. While Pretty Ugly boasts a few rolling grooves still with one foot in that camp (the by-turns menacing and sickly "Polyphonic Dreams"; the stirring second half of "Reach the Sun"), for the most part its slippery arrangements skid through an interzone between funky, R&B, and techno. "Broken beat," basically, and in fact the album strongly resembles DKD's similarly vocal-themed 2004 album Future Rage, leavened with liberal doses of Flying Lotus style fogginess. The resemblance hits hardest on the gorgeous R&B of "Fire Fly", graceful despite its stunted, shuddering groove, while the sparkly, ruminative keyboard explorations of "The Big 5ive" capture the Stevie Wonder-at-the-Mos Eisley Cantina vibe that was always broken beat's favorite costume. The album's not entirely either/or, though: The title track offers a consummate (albeit forbidding) fusion of Smart's past and future, discordant synth chords and eerie, jazz-tinged vocals doing their best to pull the rollicking funky beat out of orbit.
Framing Pretty Ugly as a broken-beat album helps account for its pleasures, but can't entirely absolve its pitfalls, perhaps because much of what is true for funky remains true for broken beat, namely, that the flight into syncopation should not be heedless. The finest examples of broken beat-- best heard on mixes like Bugz in the Attic's Fabriclive 12 or Alex Attias' Selector Series Vol. 1-- may have reveled in jolting, rococo rhythmic patterns, but nonetheless always posited a through-line, a golden thread the dancer clings to in order to make sense of the madness. In the same way that funky dances around the ghost of house, you could discern in the best broken beat's melting pot of post-funk genres a kind of dancefloor stock, a basic core ingredient of compulsive groove.
Smart doesn't turn his back on this notion, but at every opportunity he renders his music's relationship to its source material so tenuous, so stretched under the weight of its contortions, that there is little for the dancer (or listener) to glean from his abstract shapes other than the mastery of abstraction itself. It's only on the widescreen balladry of album closer "33rd Degree", with its agile, momentum-building groove, that Smart allows his music to gesture toward the merely pretty. A momentary failure of nerve perhaps, but more moments like it would offer welcome succor amidst the crusade to uncover what prettiness conceals.