Bust ups. Car park fist fights. Prison sentences. Vicious acrimonious splits resulting in major High Court settlements. Six-day self-finding mushroom binges in the Highlands. Tabloid scandals, legal wrangles, studio strangles, love triangles... absolutely none of this happened during the making of Blocks & Escher’s long, long, long awaited debut album ‘Something Blue’. But it really feels like it ought to have done. Or at least something outrageous should have happened to cause the near four-year gap between the announcement and arrival of the LP.
Not even the longest album marketing schemes stretch further than a year, especially after such a strong and sturdy rise to become next gen d&b artists as widely-tipped and respected as this London/Brighton duo. After breaking through on labels as exulted as Horizons and Digital Soundboy and developing their own Narratives imprint to buy-on-sight status, leaving fans hanging on for such a long time, without so much as a cheeky 12”? Surely that’s too much of a risk in today’s volatile market. In a scene as prone to beef as drum & bass, surely there has to have been a drama. Right? “Wrong,” laughs Phil ‘Blocks’ Smith. “Sorry to disappoint you. There’s been no drama or scandal. It was just a case of it being announced before we even started writing it. Before we even started thinking about it.”
SOMETHING OLD
Here’s the truth: ‘Something Blue’ was somewhat willed into existence by Goldie. Inspired by their precision-sculpted evergreen 12” he’d signed for his seminal label Metalheadz (‘Moods/Razor’ — a record that still tears holes out of souls and speakers just as brutally as it did in 2014), he revealed to the world that an album would soon come. Just maybe not quite as soon as he had hoped, perhaps.
“The thing is, you get Goldie on the phone, that proper ball of fire that he is, and the conversation has a life of its own,” Phil continues. “I don’t think I agreed or disagreed on our phone call, but suddenly everyone’s talking about the album. And you know what it’s like in this day and age. You say an album’s coming and everyone expects it within months.”
“I wasn’t even up for it initially,” admits Will ‘Escher’ Hansen, the bespectacled member of the operation (so you know who’s who). “I didn’t know what the point of an album was these days. Everyone’s got such a short attention span nowadays, what’s the point of doing one? But Phil persuaded me over time, saying how an album can be a statement.”
“I’m a romantic about music,” continues Phil. “As is Will. We wanted the album to have real meaning and be special. It had to, or there really was no point in doing one. It’s got to have a journey or a theme or a concept. So you go in with that mindset and you put yourself under so much pressure, you don’t get anywhere. It took us a long time to even get into second gear.”
SOMETHING NEW
It’s not the scandal we wanted, but it’s the much more realistic, widespread self-loathing epidemic we deserve. A condition that every creative person on the planet will identify with: writer’s block, a black dog that always barks at the wrong time. Turning your brain inside out, trying to squeeze out half-baked ideas that don’t even exist is hard enough, but try doing it with a strong fan-base and a man with such high expectations as Goldie watching. Waiting. Welcome to a whole new level of self-critical pain. “There was just nothing there,” states Will. “I just couldn’t do anything for a long time. We put so much pressure on ourselves, just nothing worked at all. Obviously it did eventually come together, and when it did, it flowed incredibly well and all felt very natural. But that’s easy to say now. At the time it was very stressful.”
Naturally, organically, effortlessly; throw whatever cliché you like into the mix, ‘Something Blue’ did come together, and did so in a remarkable way. The latest in a sterling line of exemplary contemporary drum & bass albums on Metalheadz — Dom & Roland’s ‘Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel’, Goldie’s ‘The Journey Man’, SCAR’s ‘The Orkyd Project’, Artificial Intelligence’s ‘Timelines’ — Blocks & Escher’s debut LP lives up to both fans’ and their own expectations. Just as Phil described, it’s a journey with meaning and a clear theme: a body of work with an oceanic narrative that draws you into its sombre, reflective and often abrasive universe from beginning to end. ‘Something Blue’ captures both the duo’s unique sound and technique, and that crisp, foreboding essence of foundation drum & bass the duo grew up on.