Da Trak Genious

Album Review

Nathan Clark, aka DJ Nate, comes from Chicago, and works in a style called Footwurk. Rooted in Chicago house (and associated with a breakdance-derived dance style of the same name), Footwurk discards the four-on-the-floor thump of traditional house music in favor of radically syncopated beats heavily informed by dubstep and grime. On his first formal full-length release, DJ Nate shows lots of potential, even if some of it remains to be fully realized. His primary talent seems to be beat construction: the spare and grimy "Turn Back Time," the jittery funk of "My Heart" and "You're Gonna Luv Me," and the horror-movie laughter and machine-gun beats of "Halloween Wurks" show that he can construct a dance groove like nobody's business, and if you've got one leg shorter than the other, so much the better. Where his talent needs a bit more development is in the area of vocal sampling: he has a tendency to take digital loops of phrases and simply repeat them over and over without pause, and without any treatment or careful juxtaposition to anything else. At times (as on the soulful "Go Hard" and the hip-hop-inflected "3-Peat") his approach works quite well, but on many other tracks (several of them unfortunately front-loaded in the program) the effect is simultaneously abrasive and dull. Hopefully, he'll develop a bit more subtlety as time goes on; in the meantime, DJ Nate is creating some genuinely interesting breaks-based music.