Album Review: Deadbeat - Eight

Regardless of whether he's investigating the spaces between sound, dubbing up a storm, or developing tribal-tech weapons in honour of the dancefloors of his adopted Berlin, Canadian producer Scott Monteith is never anything short of prolific under his Deadbeat moniker. Coming just 15 months after the mesmerising slow-burn dubscapes of Drawn And Quartered, which itself followed less than two years on from 2008's magnificent dub/club hybrid Roots And Wire, Eight sees Monteith bunkered down in a converted Berlin industrial space with minimalism on his mind.

This music is as dark and brooding as we've heard under the Deadbeat moniker, Monteith was seemingly imbued by the spirit of his surroundings to create something stark and mechanical – he's back on the dancefloor, but lurking around its murkiest fringes. Opener The Elephant In The Room is closer in spirit to the more subterranean offshoots of two-step than the world-conquering dubstep beast it spawned, before Lazy Jane (Steppers Dub) (featuring Cobblestone Jazz's Danuel Tate) moves back towards traditional dub territory. Yet it's dub of a different kind for Monteith, whose previous preference for an organic take on the sound is eschewed here for vocodered vocals and something sinister in the bass department.

When Monteith gets a little more ambitious – as on the ever-building layers of Alamat, which recalls Underworld at their punishing mid-'90s best – Eight burns with plenty of fire, but penetrating the cold production exterior is no easy task. The payoff when you get to the bubbling bassline and tribal throb of Yard is immense, though navigating the techno-by-numbers of Wolves And Angels (featuring Mathew Jonson, another Cobblestone Jazz alumnus) and My Rotten Roots to get there makes this the least fulfilling Deadbeat release of what's still quite the impressive recent trilogy.