Filastine Make Off With The Loot

Sometimes something comes across your desk and you don't know where to put it, file it, or categorize it. You sit and listen to what you've been sent and you kind of just scratch your head going what the heck is this. That's pretty much exactly what I did with Filastine's Loot album. Residing somewhere between world music, dubstep, chill out, and ambient Filastine offer a smorgasbord of tasty bass-inflected delights.

Loot is an open minded record that's political, globally aware, forward thinking, active, and laden with deep, but devastating grooves. With a variety of vocals, samples, and sounds the record sounds like a mish-mash of culture spliced together in rhythmic bliss. As Filastine himself says, "Someone had to fill a niche for polyrhythmic compositions to make something less cold and quantitative, using more gritty acoustic input(s)." That's pretty much what he's done here with the addition of broken beats, sub bass, brutal bass lines, and enough sampledelic snippets to keep you guessing for ages. This is a record that takes dubstep and gives it an education. It's tolerable and listenable because it's not infested with tuneless noise that just doesn't make sense. There's melody here as well as powerful woofer blowing mechanics and when combined the record is an eye opening electronic experience of global significance.

Filastine is awesome at what he does and Loot is the kind of dubstep/bass record I wish there were more of. Loot is the product of a wide array of influences and a global melting pot of sounds melded into one colossus of an album. Brilliant, open minded, and two steps ahead Filastine's Loot has raised the bar for not only world music but bass music as well and you have to respect that.