Akkord

Akkord's self-titled debut is a bold effort. With underground UK electronic music increasingly unmoored from its sonic origins, the group have bucked recent trends in two ways: their first-ever album on London's relatively new Houndstooth label is an exploration that cannot be boxed into one genre, and at the same time, it pays homage to key elements of the hardcore continuum. A careful listen shows that there is nothing strictly new here — the clipped junglist breaks and off-camber rhythmic patterns remain clattering above classic chiasmic sub-bass waves — but the album never settles these elements into anything familiar. Akkord is as much a dubstep album as it is a minimalist drum & bass album or techno LP: tempos jump around, drum loops come in and out of contiguity and the dub synth stabs reference London's DMZ as much as they do Berlin's Basic Channel. (Though unfortunately, some of the frenetic mixing and matching does relax into an early '00s sci-fi soundtrack atmosphere at times.) For their first-ever LP, Akkord have refused to settle for either side of the fence, and the result is both gripping and refreshing.