- Career-best breakbeats, edits and thrilling jungle from a remarkably consistent producer.
- Bored Lord's dance music is predicated entirely on triggering an emotional response. Whether that means the melancholy in one of her nostalgic rave originals, confusion or joy at a gutsy edit (like her version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), or the uplift of hearing one of your favourite a capellas floating through her breakbeats—you're gonna feel something. The Oakland-based artist self-releases (almost as often as she then deletes) so much music that it can feel hard to keep up with her, but that doesn't lessen the impact of her records. When she casually dropped 3213123 out of thin air on her birthday, I opened up Bandcamp, pressed play and was immediately floored.
"feel your love" jauntily revs to life with an addictive handclap that pings from the left side of the stereo spectrum to the right like a game of pong. It has all the Bored Lord hallmarks, including fantastically dusty hi-hats, which sound both sharp and blunt, as if they were dulled by a thick layer of dust. And the tom-toms? Perfection. Once the yearning vocal comes in, it all clicks into place, a slow-burn that becomes a triumphant groove right before your ears. The miraculous thing about 3213123 is that she nails this level of excellence eight more times.
It's hard to tell what constitutes an important or landmark release in Bored Lord's catalogue, but 3213123 feels special, a sweeping survey of what she does best. There's the raucous but atmospheric jungle that breezes by on fluffy pads on "drunk in dublin," the out-of-this-world breaks with equally strange vocal samples via "crossing the bridge," even something approaching languid hip-house ("dont you feel it"). Almost every cut toys with a a vocal hook or two, usually clipped from an R&B or hip-hop song, sometimes hung in suspension where its melody can be fully admired, other times chopped and mashed together to form grotesque new phrases. (This is best shown in the chorus of yappy voices and wordless syllables on the flamboyant "take it from the top.") A persistent, burrowing earworm that hides in the centre of any given Bored Lord track.
Aside from hooks, 3213123 has a palpable sense of momentum, both in the sequencing—the way the album ratchets up the energy towards its drum & bass denouement—and in the tracks themselves. It's difficult to imagine listening to opener "check it out" with its excitable rhythm section and ticking trap hi-hats, and not getting jazzed immediately by the Detroit-style organ stabs. Or the way the drums shimmy and shake on so many of these cuts, building up layer by layer, as if she was putting it all together on the fly. The loose and livewire feel of her work, and even the way she releases her music, is part of the excitement, but it shouldn't be mistaken for frivolity. With records like 3213123, Bored Lord captures the thrilling freedom of pre-Pro Tools dance music, before the quantized grid became a sort of prison. Like her DJ sets, it's a snapshot of freedom and aural abandon, encompassing all the feelings you get on a good night out: happiness, sadness, anger, drunkenness, the joy of friendship.
Tracklist01. check it out
02. wait wait wait
03. need your love
04. feel your love
05. dont you feel it
06. take it from the top
07. drunk in dublin
08. cant believe that its real
09. crossing the bridge