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Fred again.. - ten days

Name: Fred again.. - ten days
Item: Fred again.. - ten days
Author: Shaad D'Souza

Gepubliceerd
Sep 10, 2024
Woorden
Shaad D'Souza
Label
Atlantic Records
Uitgebracht
September 2024
Genres
House · Pop · Electronica

The superstar producer delivers another uncomplicated, largely forgettable LP that feels trapped in a nostalgia loop.
Delen
Call it luck, call it privilege, call it genuine talent, but it's hard to deny that in a few short years, Fred Gibson has achieved an extraordinary amount. The 31-year-old British producer, AKA Fred again.., has been hitting the kind of milestones that most of his peers could only hope to achieve over the course of an entire career. His 2021 debut album, Actual Life (April 14 – December 17 2020), was a misty-eyed, house-infused journal entry that arrived in addition to his main job at the time: co-writing hits for Ed Sheeran and Stormzy (in 2019, Gibson co-wrote a whopping one third of the songs in the UK charts). Actual Life followed suit in accolades, peaking at #9 on the UK Dance Albums Chart, and amassing nearly 500 million streams on Spotify alone to date. Since then, Gibson has released two more Actual Life records (each to even more success), collaborated with Romy, Sam Smith and Swedish House Mafia, and dropped an ambient record with his childhood neighbour-slash-mentor Brian Eno. Earlier this year, Gibson won two out of four GRAMMY nominations, even competing against himself in the Best Dance/Electronic Recording category. Gibson has reached a point where he can announce a string of arena shows anywhere in the world with only a few days' notice and instantly sell them out (as was the case in Australia last year). Unlike a lot of mainstream electronic producers, he's not an anonymous face churning out hits that disperse into the ether. His music is synonymous with his own grinning face, shining out from behind the decks during a Boiler Room set or next to Skrillex and Four Tet on the Coachella live stream. Gibson presents his albums as audio diaries, filled with spoken word samples of people he meets on tour, on the tube or around the streets of London. It's this relatable quality that seems to be the most divisive among music fans. It either inspires devotion from dance music casuals or zealous critique from those who rebuke the idea that a toff is finding outsized success off the back of a supposedly authentic British sound, neatly packaged for the masses. This kind of discourse should be inane—many producers come from moneyed backgrounds, they just don't expose themselves front and centre like Gibson does—but it's had an interesting domino effect. Any time an apparently credible producer like Four Tet enters Gibson's orbit, "sell-out" accusations start to get thrown about; a rare occurrence in an era when the lines between pop music and "authentic" dance music are more blurred than ever. ten days, Gibson's fourth album and first non-Actual Life-branded release, only slightly shifts the parameters of his quintessential sound. The LP is built around sung vocals—including Gibson's—hazy rhythms and uncomplicated melodic samples, meaning that we thankfully don't have to consider the implications of landed gentry sampling a construction worker in Atlanta, nor do we have to resist the urge to just flick Spotify to some late-period Burial instead. The contents of ten days is still unmistakably Fred again..: soft-hearted house and techno ballads with the Instagram Rio de Janeiro filter laid over them. They have a tendency to swing into ponderous beatless stretches or build to saccharine synth drone finales as if they know that their final destination will ultimately be a short film produced by Nike and directed by a young British creative. Some songs feel like copied-homework versions of other tracks: the Chika and Anderson .Paak collaboration "places to be" nods to Kelis and Andre 3000's "Millionaire;" "just stand there," featuring Northern Irish vocalist SOAK, plays like a more treacly version of Melle Brown and Annie Mac's 2022 lovefest "Feel About You." The tracks that feel like direct tributes to older, better tunes tend to fare better than the majority of the album, which is hugely sentimental but never sufficiently sharpens its edges to counteract all that mush. "glow," despite boasting six producers—Gibson, Four Tet, Skrillex, Joy Anonymous, Duskus and Parisi—is boilerplate EDM, youthfully euphoric but easily forgettable. (Perhaps having six producers work on it contributed to the anonymity.) The album continues to struggle from there. "ten" features the slippery, gossamer vocals of talented London upstart Jim Legxacy, but here he's largely used as another piece of furniture, a texture to blend into Gibson's rounded-off house beat. "peace u need," another collaboration with Joy Anonymous, aims for exalted piano house, but, like much of Gibson's music, feels like it's playing from a distance, washed out in a way that registers as meaning to convey depth or nostalgia. In practice, it feels more like Gibson was struck by lightning while watching a Skins club scene, and is forever doomed to make electronic music only fit to soundtrack forlorn glances, abject tragedies and single tears dribbling from perfectly glossed eyes.
Tracklist