There has been discussion of “the death of the music blog” and the fact that in the world of Tumblr we don’t need hipsters with English degrees writing flowery, insipid music commentary. After perusing the first few pages of Google results from the query “Leaving EP”, I see where these sentiments are coming from. People regurgitate the same quotes Skrillex gave to Rolling Stone, conclude that Skrillex is moving in a Burial-esque direction because he has cited the dude as an influence and maybe say something else about how they have secretly enjoyed his past output. Ummmm…
OK music journalists quit being a bunch of lazy fuckboys. If you spend some time actually listening to this EP, contextualizing it in a realm greater than in the scope of few quotes Sonny Moore threw at some press dude he probably didn’t know, there’s no way you can come to the “oh, look Skrillex is making English dubstep now” conclusion. Go ahead and disagree, but I see the Leaving EP as Skrillex grappling with the monster he has wrought and attempting to align the music he wants to create with the music his (obsessive, devoted) fans wants to hear. I know the masses of dirty-midrange-craving kids quite intimately and they are a scary, immovable force. Political-economic constraints on media output actually do exist outside of media studies classrooms and in this case, Sonny Moore is shackled by hundreds of thousands of kids who use his music to exorcise their angst and derive some enjoyment from the relatively miserable existence of the non-athletic kid in suburban America. I would wager my laptop that Skrillex would love to release a white label on Swamp 81 of hard-hitting, mind-fuck techno but I would make the same wager that a negligible portion of his fans would follow him over to the good side. Instead they would shift their affection over to one of his even more aggro clones (wow, yeah I hate those guys) and Sonny Moore would lose his influence over these kids that are probably a lot like him when he was growing up.
Hit the jump for the full review…
The Astral Plane 