Noisia
Outer Edges

I must admit that I eagerly dove into the new, second album of the Dutch trio, even though the works produced since the previous Split the Atom hadn't quite convinced me. The impression was of a group of producers now trapped in pernicious hedonism with little room for improvement on the composition front. Outer Edges not only reinforces this conviction but exacerbates it due to the drastic choices made by Noisia for the album's production. As the title suggests, the aim is a violent return to a frontier sound, without compromise. Not that the group had actually given in to the mainstream, despite the popularity gained, but the removal of any collaboration and vocal guest stars shows the commendable objective of producing a dirty, rough, and visceral electronic album. The results, however, are another matter.

In terms of sound design, Outer Edges is simply amazing, there might not be anything comparable out there, it sounds like an album composed with alien equipment and shot back in time, all the sounds are meticulously crafted, and many libraries are also innovative. The sound cleanliness is (paradoxically) extreme. In this sense, the goal is fully achieved, but technique alone is not enough, and the total lack of progression in many of the album's tracks, no fewer than 18, almost all very short and without particular developments, is noticeable. Many of them wander without a precise direction, quickly evaporating and leaving the listener in perpetual dissatisfaction. Essentially, the only quantifiable tracks on a conventional scale are Anomaly and Collider, unsurprisingly the singles released before a massive leak forced the group to distribute the album well ahead of schedule. Anyway, neither of the two tracks particularly stands out and both prove to be derivative: Anomaly is a classic neurofunk track, heavily inspired by Prolix, while Collider looks to Phace and Misanthrop's Neosignal, who have collaborated with Noisia on other occasions. I also found little to appreciate in the reference to N-Joy's Adrenalin, which was far more astonishing in 1991.

The rest of the album really concedes too much to experiments that are too brief and almost never successful: Voodoo seems like a homage to the Prodigy, but after an exhilarating start, the piece completely loses its way, making you really miss Voodoo People. Vigilantes, Tentacles, Straight Hook, and Sinkhole are electronic freaks that will probably excite design fetishists, but one is left wondering what they should convey to the listener, who is forced to navigate through cacophonous passages, breaks, hip hop samples, and other annoyingly pretentious oddities. Tiresome, despite the brevity, also because these digressions take away space from opportunities I would have liked to see developed, like the pauses in Surfaceless, Stonewalled, and Exavolt, the latter being one of the most successful snippets, a sort of magnetic blend of jazz, t-rap, and electro, but it's just a snippet, indeed, it's really complicated to define it as a complete track, and artists like Reso have reached much higher levels with similar material. Noisia's primary concern seems to be never to indulge in structures and solutions deemed conventional for the genre, as in the few cases of rather straightforward drum and bass, let's say, proposed with Motion Blur, Into Dust, and Mantra, although these episodes too are evanescent, unfocused, and completely purposeless.

A pity this Outer Edges, essentially. An album all about appearance, fantastic technically but with little to say and ending up annoying the listener with hedonistic experiments of questionable value. Evidently, we are dealing with three great sound producers, at the top of their craft, but too obsessed with being original at all costs and fundamentally unable to employ their talent in the composition—and logic—of an album.