It takes just one minute to get into Feed Me’s newest EP, Escape from Electric Mountain. At approximately 1:08, the beat drops on the album’s first track “Trapdoor,” spiraling into the glitchy, in-your-face, knob-spinning breakdown Feed Me has built his sound around.
Escape from Electric Mountain is the British DJ’s follow-up EP to 2011’s four-track To the Stars. Quietly signed to Mau5strap Records since 2008, Feed Me has just started to emerge from under the radar, with plans to headline his first U.S. tour this March.
His new EP has all the elements of a Feed Me success story: poppy electro, choppy dubstep and the finger-tapping beat that ties it all together. But after the glorious breakdown known as 1:08, the short six-track EP fails to live up to its potential.
The EP skips from genre to genre, resulting in an album that demands to be played in no specific order. The tone set by the angsty lyrics sung by British band Hadouken! in club-ready “Trapdoor” is shattered with the next track, “Relocation.”
“Relocation” by itself is masterful: a satisfying, layered, muted electro track with snippets of Feed Me’s own previously-released track “Blood Red” tucked into the outro. The track is a deviation from Feed Me’s style and is reminiscent of Deadmau5’s “Strobe,” with both tracks taking listeners to a musical realm they didn’t expect.
But just when listeners are basking in the electro-zen, they are ripped into reality with the spoken word intro of the third track, “One Click Headshot.”
After a few dubby seconds, Feed Me’s video gamer fans could hear the beloved voice of Doug from “Pure Pwnage” saying, “My hands are shakin’! My hands are shakin’! But I’m still shootin’! An’ I’m still gettin’ headshots! It’s like, boom! Headshot! Boom! Headshot! Boom! Headshot!”
Although the track looks like it will stay high-energy after the vocal sample, it fails to go beyond the rapid-fire blips of synth that sounded so good for the first 30 seconds.
“Embers” meets a similar disappointing fate. Starting with the dulcet voice of vocalist Lindsay, Feed Me at first adeptly layers the vocals in with piano, electro chord progressions and a persistent dance beat. But after a record-spinning buildup, the middle of the song veers off, forgetting the beginning and doing its own thing before almost abruptly reintroducing piano. The outro manages to blend the sections, but it comes about five minutes too late for the song to be cohesive.
Luckily, “Trichitillomania” comes in to remind the listener what Feed Me is all about. It seems as if Feed Me treated the song like a slow cooker, continually throwing in beats and sounds until it got something resembling dinner. With tempo changes, flipped switches, dub wobbles and synthy tones, the track has all the technical elements that one expects from the DJ, but the lack of an outro left the song ending on a dull note.
Cue “Whiskers” to save the day. By far the standout track, the collaboration with dubstep artist Gemini is the type of song that forces a listener to flail their body about. The end result sounds part Porter Robinson, part electric keyboard, part movie score, but all satisfying. As far as final tracks go, “Whiskers” was definitely the correct pick.
Pieces of Escape from Electric Mountain showcase Feed Me’s incredible skill, but overall the EP was underwhelming, leaving the listener hungering for more of what they know the DJ can do.
3 out of 5 stars
