Kill The Noise doesn’t take EPs light-heartedly. 2011’s Kill Kill Kill clocked in at ten tracks with six tunes and four remixes; this has seven originals. We begin with the title track – ‘Kill The Noise Pt. 2’ – and ‘Jump Ya Body’, drum’n’bass and brostep romps respectively. Sound familiar?
But, it doesn’t take many bars of KTN’s silly graveyard electro for you to realise the man has actually cleaned up his act with regards to production. An influence is beginning to take hold of KTN that wouldn’t disappoint fans of Infected Mushroom’s hallucinogenic psytrance. The composition is varied, yet full of sense, and the synth is intricate. The title track sounds worryingly sincere, ‘Jump Ya Body’s vocal slicing is clever. The last EP’s spiralling filth is maintained while, somehow, everything sounds much cleaner, more professional and thought-out; something which, at a glance of his continuing theme of Skrillexist skulls’n’fire, you really, really wouldn’t expect. You want this to be more of the same, you want this to be terrible, but KTN has taken everything that annoyed me about the last EP and turned it inside out…
…with a few exceptions. ‘Rockers’ is a fairly standard modern electro house affair in pretty much every sense of the word, which nowadays unfortunately includes the completely unnecessary double-time brostep-influenced breakdown. The track doesn’t need it. It will remind you of everything else in the charts.
‘Mosh It Up’ adds to KTN’s growing portfolio of outside-the-scene experiments. The last time you will have heard something like this is if, God forbid, you gave his collaboration on Skrillex’s Bangarang – ‘Right On Time’ – a listen. KTN has once again given himself a kick up the bum here; where ‘Right On Time’ sounded like a pointless mess, he has given this three minutes due care and attention, somehow creating a Jumpstyle/trap hybrid. I’m still confused as to how he’s gotten away with this.
‘Thumbs Up’ and ‘Saturn’ follow. The former is a splendid 110BPM jaunt with fellow OWSLA artist Feed Me, whose influence oddly seems much more apparent on the latter (which instead features Brillz and Minxx – not going to lie, I have no idea who these people are) – this track, when not exhibiting KTN’s new-found ability to produce tamed filth, actually manages to present us with a beautiful trance-esque chordscape accompanied by soothing vocals, leaving us with a piano sequence. Who’d have thought it? Well KTN certainly had this planned, as ‘To Be Continued…’ features absolutely nothing but. It really is a different way to finish, but the end of Black Magic provides an air of expectancy that you could only really derive from, well, classical music – and with the reprise of KTN’s main theme, this bookend really preps you for whatever the crazy New Yorker will conjure up next.
8/10
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