Sport

Sport is a refreshing treat for fans of electronic/dance music in the 21st century. In 2016, electronic music has infiltrated rock and pop music to the point of ubiquity. EDM & dubstep artists/producers like Deadmau5 and Bassnectar are the highest paid rockstars of our time, earning top headlining slots are the biggest music festivals around the world. Walk into any grocery store and you'll hear Auto-Tuned robot-singing and digital beats. Meanwhile, any nonmusical civilian with a laptop can produce immaculate-sounding electronic music. In the post-Pro Tools world, this kind of stuff has become all too cheap and easy to make and so naturally it's everywhere.Powell's music stands out from the rest because it sounds like he's made it by hand. It's grimy. The beats don't always sync up. Arpeggiators spit out atonal, distorted figures like a video game in its death throes. The sounds are lo-fi, featuring digital clipping, choppily edited audio, farty analog synth bleats and corpulent bass frequencies that most producers would suck out of the mix.And yet most of Sport is still very much *dance* music - the beats will compel you to move (unlike, say, the rhythmically vague work of experimental artists like Autechre or Actress). The single "Johnny (feat. Johnny)" may be the best case for Powell's ability to fill a dancefloor., with its mid-tempo grind and sexy blase vocal. Things frequently go wonky and weird too, like in the lurching "Do You Rotate?", which lumbers along like a monster made of badly-sutured body parts, or in "Gone A Bit Bendy", where the producer mischievously speeds up and slows down the tempo, daring you to try to find the groove. Sampled guitar riffs, found-sounds and vocal snippets keep things texturally varied, and the album never settles into predictable territory.