Martyn - The Air Between Words

Martyn
The Air Between Words
17 June 2014
Ninja Tune

3 stars out of 5

 

Dutch DJ/producer Martijn Deijkers gives us his third LP under the moniker Martyn, The Air Between Words, and it’s yet another whiplash-inflicting switch in direction. Long gone is the dubstep of his 2009 debut, Great Lengths, as is the 2-step/garage revivalism of 2011’s Ghost People. Now, Martyn is mining the burned-out wastelands of Detroit techno in this fifty-three minute homage to Carl Craig and Juan Atkins, and while successful on tracks like “Empty Mind” and “Lullaby,” Deijkers doesn’t sustain a fresh approach to the genre over the length of the album.

It’s not all Detroit here—“Drones” is basically Chelmsford circa 1995 (that means early Squarepusher for you non-Essex-residing folks), minus the frantic drum’n’bass drum programming. Former Hype Williams member Inga Copeland (sorry, it’s just “copeland” now, without even a capital C for emphasis) is featured on “Love of Pleasure,” but the track doesn’t approach the exciting experimentation of her own material, either solo or with Dean Blunt. Album highlight “Like That” is oddly among both the most interesting and the most derivative tracks on the album—a case where Deijkers almost could be faulted for getting it too right.

The Air Between Words should have been a lot better than it is, but it isn’t, and that’s just the way it is. There’s no sense in us protesting en masse outside the Dutch embassy, waving our little signs and chanting our little activist tunes. There’s no petition we can sign nor NGO we can volunteer for in the jungles of Cameroon—we just have to heave our collective sigh on this one and accept that we cannot achieve a better Martyn record through democratic means. (That was a joke—protesting against the actions of a democratically-elected government is very clearly anti-democratic. *wink*) At any rate, Deijkers will probably get bored of Detroit techno within a couple of weeks anyway, so we should just wait to see what genre he decides to tackle next and maybe we’ll be satisfied again.

reviewed by Richard Krueger