japan four

Ghoul - '3Mark'

This is ridiculously good. Finally this group look like living up to their name; there's a muscle and colour depth to this track that their previous recorded forays - skittish if enticing one, two minute synth scribbles and vocal snatches - lacked. One might level a 'dubstep 101' at '3Mark', but I'd argue it's offering dubstep a place to go beyond its own border, a post-dubstep if you're okay with wanky prefixes. Sure, there's the obligatory glitchy basebeat and chipmunk vocal mirror, but there's also a palpable cleanliness and determination that a lot of dubstep lacks. It's as a poppy a dubstep track that you'll ever hear in this regard, yet one that maintains the enticing schematic quality of Ghoul that always gives the song room to breathe and burrow.

There's also a sense of the arbitrary or serendipitious about it - a nonsensical title, like it was randomly culled from the lettering on the bottom of some consumer electronics item or the strings of a webpage script - a vocal hook, that never quite provides the crucial second half of its own dictum. 'Choose life, / over...', 'over...', 'over...' - the fact that Ghoul never answer their own question is an indication of the group's philosophy, their sense of experience as stochastic, of music's ability to do justice to that which cannot be worked out.