No U-Turn

By: Richard Dinsdale
Label: Toolroom Records
Written by: BenGomori
Rating: 6/10


Erstwhile Ministry Of Sound resident (at least we think he still is?) Richard Dinsdale has been pretty prolific in recent years, churning out a vast body of work with mixed results. He’s created quite a few gems in an electro house and fidgety kinda style, but also quite a lot of forgettable run-of-the-millness. This dichotomy is exactly replicated here in his debut album for Toolroom.
 
Sonica kicks things off in unremarkable but effective enough fashion – it’s in the usual Toolroom vein of electro house riffs with minimal techno percussion, and isn’t saying anything particularly new or memorable. But his talent soon becomes evident on Love Doctor – reverberating triple kick drums, African snare rhythms and an old skool disco vocal sample aren’t the most obvious bedfellows, but make for a lovely slab of chunky heads-down tribalism.
 
Keen to show he’s not just about 127 house and techno, Haunted House (no pun intended) is a chugging, pitched-down electro beast with a jagged arpeggiated bassline and spooky synths and sirens aplenty that any of the Ed Banger lot would be proud to create. Let Yourself Go with Wray is the albums vocal anthem – and is a pretty solid effort, with its huge builds, tight, punchy sound and monotone bass tempering Wray’s impassioned wailing.
 
The quality drops with the forgettable, identikit techno throb of Hole In One, but we’re soon back on track with the lovely Get Off The Streets – a melancholic electro houser with lots of cool little riffs, twists and turns and breaks. It’s a little like Justice rubbing oulders with Mylo or summat – very tasty. Video, Audio & Cassette toughens things up further with its boshing electro stomp – on-beat cymbals and an almost glam rock style b-line and some euphoric riffs making it a peak-time belter.
 
But for all this imaginativeness, there’s still more tracks that lack any spark. Up & Down is a nauseating electro buzzard, and High School Dream is equally droning and irritating, like a fly that needs swatting. But then Whistle comes out of nowhere to finish things off in a rather unexpected fashion – sounding like the ghost of Soul II Soul battling it out with Lemon Jelly, and quite successfully at that.
 
So what we have here are 6 great tracks, and 4 sub-par ones. It’s clear he’s got some great ideas and is an excellent producer when he puts his mind to it – but the album format is a stretch to far for him at this stage. Besides which, even with the good tracks, it doesn’t exactly work as an album. Grab the better tracks off download is our advice – they are well worth your money. Perhaps by the time he’s ready for album number 2 he’ll be able to maintain the quality. Not a bad effort by any means though.