Peaking Lights

http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/15184/1/peaking-lights-lucifer-in-dub

Lucifer in Dub is streaming here now, I'm really liking it so far.

I have difficulty parsing this music as dub in any way. I find the tag hugely confusing. Just sounds like 4ad on a boom box. Just cos the midrange gets turned down on the bassline doesn't automatically make it dub.

echo, delay, note choices, rhythmic structure? i mean it's not joe gibbs but pretty clearly & heavily influenced by classic dub.

I really can't get into peaking lights

Like many in this thread I like the description of Peaking Lights more than the result.

No I still don't hear it. The rhythms are not dubby. The echoes are not dubby. They're just rhythms and echoes like in any modern music. For me, dub is as much about the groove as the sonic signfiers - the skipping, forward motion and the way the way the bass wraps around the beat; the syncopation and emphasis on the offbeat. These rhythms are played in a very straight beat-oriented style same as rock and techno. The echoes are just shoegazey washes of reverb as opposed to 3/4 delays.
This sounds like the Cocteaus with a more prominent bassline and lower production standards.
It's not that I don't like it - it's nice enough in its way. And of course you can take elements of a style (like dub) and alter it to fit a different aesthetic or style. But when people talk about Peaking Lights in this 'oh they're like dub mixed with Ze records and post-rock' this is not what I am expecting at all.

^uh sorry, iPhone

The rhythms are not dubby.

Yes they are.

The echoes are not dubby

Yes they are.

Dub doesn't have to be anything and doesn't have to be the thing you wanted or expected it to be, thankfully. It can be a shoegazy album with effects (not that i think this record is merely that). Saying that it sounds more like the Cocteaus than like a dub album does make me wonder if you have ears though.

What? But that's like saying you don't have to be able to sit in a chair for it to be a chair. If I played you a Blur song and told you it was techno and then you said it wasn't techno, by this rationale I could say 'techno doesn't have to be the thing you want it to be'.

dl i think you're being overly prescriptive, something can be dubby or dub-influenced without having much in the way of roots reggae signifiers. that said i think PL have plenty in the way of roots reggae signifiers (organ chords and percussion on the upbeats a lot of the time, 8th note heavy reggae-ish basslines, etc)

not sure if you (DL) are saying this after listening to the stream of the new one but it has a few tracks where the rhythms get fucked about w/ and are way less 'straight' than on Lucifer

well DL Dunis is merely putting this out as a dubbier version of her recent record which is what this is. You're judging it against a claim that she hasn't even made for it.

FWIW i find it a bit exhausting to listen to although a couple of the incarnations seem better, on first listen, than the straight versions.

Jordan otm. I wouldn't ever call Peaking Lights "dub", but I would definitely say that they are heavily influenced by dub and that is made pretty obvious by the music.

I don't see how Peaking Lights' use of the word "dub" is in any way more controversial than a billion artists before them - early Seefeel strikes me as being a good point of comparison in this regard.

I'm listening to this now, Live Love as it happens, and seriously, these rhythms are no more dubby than anything else with a drum machine track and a bassline on it. In fact the beats land in a very grid-like way. I just don't see how this has any more of a dub influence than anything else with the odd phaser or echo effect thrown in. I don't think the note choices are particularly of classic dub, and besides the basslines are played really quite fast. If there's any sort of West Indian influence it would be something like early-mid '90s Bim Sherman type stuff which is more digital dancehall. Cosmic Tides, now yeah I guess the bassline is kind of dubby. But shit, it's a very plain and staid impression of dub. I can't help feeling it misses much of the point. But that's my opinion I guess.
I'll grant you the cocteau's comparison is tenuous though - it's more to do with the use of drum machines and dreamy female vox.

Fwiw I'm talking about lucifer

That was a few xposts.

936 was much more overtly dub influenced so if you've heard that one first it's easier to hear the bits of it that are still there in Lucifer

check out the new one linked above (the, uh, dub versions) or 936

xp

seefeel use the dub to achieve a kind of stasis, though. this seems a bit manic but that's a fairly typical form of dub too. it's actually fairly close to the mad professor's take on protection but without the production chops imo. this is a bit headachy for me.

but "no protection" is too.

a bit headachy, i mean.

Dunis is merely putting this out as a dubbier version of her recent record which is what this is

according to the press bumph the dub edits were Coyes' work - not sure if she had any further involvement

Xpost Well... I guess it's hard to separate dub signifiers from reggae signifiers anyway(for me at least). I always found dubstep to be a ponderous term because, despite the deep basslines an echoes, I couldn't really equate it with dub as far as my view of it went, if you see what I mean. As I say, dub for me in it's most vital sense is as much about the ebb and flow and 'feel' as it is about the rumbling bass and echoes because the latter two elements are pretty much ubiquitous throughout contemporary music anyway.

I def wanna check out the dub versions of these.

see i think what you like is actually reggae

Never a truer word said ;-)

But i can hear the dub influence in, for example Primal Scream's Vanishing Point and a lot of Andrew Weatherall's work, and little of that has much to do with reggae on an explicit level

fwiw i don't like peaking lights as much as i think i could and the poor (imo) production values are the barrier. even in those podcasts she put out, 6 hours of mixes (i use the word loosely) some amazing track selections but woeful sequencing & jarring segues. that was obviously what she was going for though, for some reason.

The word "dub" was also used in the 1980s for instrumental versions of vocal club tracks. A lot of these "dubs" weren't really all that "dubby".

it's 'he' that does all those mixes iirc

ah ok.

lol dog latin how do you feel about the term 'dub techno'?

confused because it means different things to different people. are we talking, like, Basic Channel or Dreadzone or what?

usually people mean dreadzone, when they talk about dub techno yes.

who are basic channel, btw?

how'd you get to be so smart, ronan?

http://rateyourmusic.com/genre/Dub+Techno/

more like dreadfulzone amirite

this is great! i didn't realize it was mastered by sonic boom before, but that makes a lot of sense.

finally checked out Lucifer In Dub. not really any reason to listen to it instead of just putting on Lucifer imo.

new one kinda sux :-(

sounds like tom tom club, sort of, just not good

huh ... I do think Breakdown sounds like Tom Tom Club but in a good way ... haven't heard the whole record

having a hard time getting through this. i feel like if you have a singer who is, let's say, 'not conventionally good', you have to take a lot more care to flatter them. the vocals sound uncomfortably exposed here since the music is so much more stripped down.

musically it sounds like record collector late '70s/early '80s electro funk to me, which is cool i guess, but not nearly as appealing to me as 936-style diy dub.

i read the tom tom club comments and got really excited for a second because i mistakenly thought i had the grouper thread open instead of the peaking lights thread

Breakdown stands heads and shoulders above the rest of this, which is nice enough but not brilliant and the vocals are definitely much more of an issue here.

this record by some labelmates of mine captures a similar feeling to early PL, imo (also happen to be a married duo): https://hushhushrecords.bandcamp.com/album/secret-angles

Not that we really need anymore proof that the NME are utterly useless but this review shows just how little they even try anymore.

http://www.nme.com/reviews/peaking-lights/15687

That cannot be a review of the same record I've listened to.

The first line made me smile.

I really wanted to like this record :-/

is there something obvious I'm missing about that review that makes it bad enough to be highlighted for scorn? just reads like a completely standard downpager to me