Clark - Turning Dragon

If you only buy one example of a genre you never really knew existed this year, make sure it’s not Burial. Make sure it’s this. Unlike the posho-hippie luncheon backdrop of a Mark II ‘Blue Lines’, Clark’s ‘Turning Dragon’ is the real deal.

For a start there are these schizophrenic rhythms that sound like the result of a particularly complex maths equation being solved by the repetitive slamming of your head against a wall. Then there are tracks that possess sounds so equally parts terrifying and paranoid sounding, it’s almost as if one is causing the other; like those ‘call and response’ techniques in classical music, just with stronger allusions to stalking.

Unpredictable? Restless? If only it were that easy to categorise. While ‘Ache Of The North’ is the exact neo-gothic paranoia an ‘Endtroducing’ era DJ Shadow would have made if he’d composed the soundtrack to Blade Runner, ‘Truncation Horns’ is basically just a Prince master tape that’s been attacked with a pair of scissors.

There are serene moments of ambience, such as on ‘Hot May Slide’, and then there’s something like ‘Volcan Veins’, a four minute assault of sexed-up pissed off vocals that offers perhaps the best excuse to form a clubbers’ mosh pit since SebastiAn’s ‘Ross Ross Ross’.

‘Turning Dragons’ is like a precocious genius that can’t decide at what in particular it’s going to brilliant at, so just chooses everything. Awesome without ever alienating, this is as every bit as thrilling an electronic album as you could possibly hope for.