Stone Cold Love at First Hear

A review from online Seattle newspaper, LINE OUT.

King Midas Sound: Stone Cold Love at First Hear

posted by DAVE SEGAL on THU, OCT 22, 2009 at 11:04 AM

King Midas Sound (producer Kevin Martin and vocalist Roger Robinson) strikes me as a fantastical fantasy project hatched from two of Charles Mudede's biggest musical crushes—Burial and Tricky. The duo's album on Hyperdub,Waiting for You... (due in November), sounds like an ideal merging of those artists' phenomenal talents. Difference is, Robinson can really sing, emitting creamy, soulful sotto-voce sentiments in wispy clouds over Martin's subtly noir-ish lovers dubstep; main exception is "Earth a Kill Ya," a doom-laden, Linton Kwesi Johnson/SpaceApe-style ecological-warning manifesto.

Understatement is King Midas Sound's watchword, but this low-key approach somehow magnifies the songs' impact. Musically, this is the mellowest Martin—notorious for his extreme frequency fucking with the Bug, Ice, Curse of the Golden Vampire, and many other endeavors—has gotten since the ambient disc on the 1995 classic Re-Entry. But the cumulative power of Waiting for You...'s simmering, sensual sizzle and its aura of post-coital/post-breakup desolation keeps swirling through my head and gripping my heart with muted desperation.

Album of the year, unless somebody surprises the hell out of me in the next two months.