Snatch

Album Review

From the languished trip-hop of Music for Babies to the sublime big beat on Turn the Dark Off, Howie B. has excelled at rewiring the latest thing in electronica to display not only his stellar production skills but also his ear for unheard beats and overall knack for creating excellent headphone music. To that extent, Snatch is a similar record. The jumping-off point for this one, however, is the increasingly experimentalist slant of electronic music during the late '90s, displayed by the slipped-disc sample minimalism of artists such as Autechre, Panasonic, and Mouse on Mars. The opener, "Gallway," takes a few minutes of static electricity to launch into its muted beat attack, while the sub-bass depth on "Cook for You" is practically off the charts. "Trust" blends a few phlegmatic effects reminiscent of Mouse on Mars with glazed-eye minimalism of the Philip Glass variety and a melodica sample perhaps gleaned from his trip to Jamaica (the results of which appeared on Sly & Robbie Stripped to the Bone by Howie B., released less than a month before). Of course, a month's working vacation in Kingston is going to result in radically different music than spending time in the new-experimentalist center of Köln, but Snatch successfully fuses the earthier side of dub and trip-hop with abstract electronics. It's by far his best album yet.