News Shankles

When you’re forever pointlessly imbibing new music, sometimes it’s difficult to differentiate between something that is brilliant and something that is just trying too hard to be different. So if you’ve spent the past couple of hours blog trawling, listening to aborted hit after aborted hit, have a palate cleanser before you approach this – Radio 1 or something, whatever you can stomach – as Shankles doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with that kind of confusion.

Coming out towards the back end of March, ‘Gully Foil’ EP has gone by relatively unnoticed given the levels of hype surrounding other, vaguely similar works. Put out through Jus Like Music records (a name which massively fails to evoke the power and energy that their first release embodies), it snuck into consciousness, impressing only those who stumbled across it rather than being tweeted and blogged about to high heaven. It’s a shame – through the course of these five tracks (with a remix tagged on to the end), Shankles unearths himself as a delicately talented producer, massively affected by all that has proceeded him but still finding his own voice with that noise. There’s a shimmer of industrialism that runs through it, the kind of beats that Former Ghosts might be known for if Freddy Ruppert wasn’t so stunningly tortured and articulate.

Perhaps the main reason it hasn’t already risen to a decent level of prominence is one of competition – these songs are great, but it would take a brave person to call them radio friendly, even within the context of a song like Cloud Boat’s ‘Lions on the Beach’ getting airplay. But this is a release to be lingered upon, to stew over on the night bus instead of James Blake, loitering in the memory in its own affected way.

Gully Foil EP by Shankles