Dubstep Blows Your Head

Americans have finally caught on to a movement and sub genre that was perfected across the pond and is absolutely massive everywhere else. This movement? Dubstep. And if you've missed jumping on the bandwagon, there's still time to get on board with the dub. What is dubstep? Well imagine the power, noise, clangs, and wobbles of Drum and Bass slowed down and drawn out to downtempo speeds and you essentially have what dubstep is all about. This is a sound that centers around LOADS of sub-bass wobbling through woofers at alarmingly deep pitches and at stupifyingly slow bpm's in an effort to shuffle your head right off of your neck. If ever there was a movement dedicated to bass bin worship this would be it.

Diplo, and the fine folks at his label, Mad Decent have gathered together sixteen tracks from the dubstep massive and put them all together on one handy dandy primer entitled, Blow Your Head. The compilation is a mind rattling, earth shattering record of downtempo destruction that stands to destroy everything in its path. It only seems appropriate then, that the record is called, Blow Your Head. With several of the tracks being flooringly fantastic and others so jaw droppingly annoying it's hard to determine who this will pester the most. As someone who loves old school drum and bass/jungle, it annoys me a bit. I just wish they'd pitch the records back up and play them at normal speed. The whole of Blow Your Head sounds like a bunch of dark core tech step records slowed down from 45 to 33 rpm and at times it gets to be too much.

Dubstep is the movement du jor at the moment and every hipster and party kid in the world finds this stuff essential. Blow Your Head isn't bad, but I'm just not a fan of all this slow tempo grinding dance music. Dance music should constantly be moving at 128-130 beats per minute and this seems to hover around 100 or so. That being said, if you don't think of dubstep as dance music, but just punishingly heavy bass dominant music, Blow Your Head is unearthly. The power of songs like, "Youth Blood," by Little Jinder and the spastic and bouncy, "Glazed," by Brackles is truly amazing. These are songs here that could shatter glass, break bones, and absolutely destroy sound systems. As a record of rampant musical carnage you cannot get much better than this. Blow Your Head might annoy some and might leave others begging for mercy...it all depends on how you feel about your eardrums getting dragged out through your nose. If you love bass and love power, you'll find dubstep brilliant, if you don't like the idea of death by sine wave...you might want to hide under your bed because the dubstep invasion is pressing on.