Entering the Decagon: Blu Mar Ten at #10

This will kick off an overall artist analysis for my 10 favorite artists. I'll judge them by the eight categories I listed in my relevant blog entry, with one addition: album construction. An artist who knows how to pace an album, give flow where it's necessary, and produce the album in a cohesive fashion can make the album greater than the sum of its parts. This criterion was inapplicable to just talking about songs, but it's a crucial ninth element in distinguishing the novelists from the article writers, so to speak.

Anyway, to Blu Mar Ten, coincidentally at #10 on my list. They're a trio of guys from England who work in the at-odds genres of drum'n'bass and chillout, but their overall style of songwriting suits both equally. More recently, they've started to fuse the two strains, and this year's results on the experiment are breathtaking. They were already great before, but the album due this year may put them over the top into greatness. They've had some underground success and got a song into the Dance Dance Revolution franchise, but chart success is still far away. Not that they seem to care as long as they make good music and continue to travel to places to play their stuff. For that matter, band member Chris Marigold is highly accessible on Facebook and even on AIM; this connection's only a small point in their favor, but it's still a point.

Their relevant works are:
Producer 03 (2003, unsurprisingly), a drum'n'bass work released without their permission but is still their only freestanding album in the genre.
Six Million Names of God (2003), an instrumental chillout work that, while suffering occasionally from lack of melody, nonetheless has a fantastic flow, competent mood-setting, and a leftfield cover of The Cars' "Drive" that must be heard to believed.
Black Water (2007), another chillout album but one more determined to bring the beats and the occasional club/vocal track. This album is an all-time great and my recommended entry point, as it's lush, colorful, inviting, and engaging enough to be far more than background. Best album of 2007, all things considered.
Close EP (2009), only three tracks but a prelude to a single coming out this month and the album later this year. The title track is bland, but the other two tracks, "Above Words" and "If I Could Tell You," are chillout produced with a drum'n'bass vibe and at that tempo, which makes for propulsive chillout, if that can even happen. Both the tracks I mentioned have YouTube videos up from the band, so go check them out.

(This is a great opportunity to state my linking policy. A, I'm lazy. B, You know to how use the Internet as well as I do if you've come across my obscure blog. C, I run the risk of making my posts outdated if I link. D, It just doesn't accomplish much for the work I'd have to put into it. The Facebook reprint served a different purpose initially; it's aberrational re: this policy.)

Back to the discography for a second...for some odd reason, Blu Mar Ten has a bunch of random singles available on ITunes, even sometimes just one song for .99. I have them all, and on the whole they're just not worth getting compared to the albums. The primary exceptions are "Starting Over" from the Weapons of Mass Creation 3 compilation (although Chris Marigold has told me that he doesn't like it, which is strange) and the Clarky Cats/Untitled No. 1 single. If you buy "Mace" from Beatport, it has a skip in it that they haven't fixed for me after over a year. Just random warnings there.

On to the nine qualities of an artist:

1) Chord sequences. This isn't a strength, but it's not a weakness, and in a lot of electronic music that's as good as you're gonna get. You're not going to get sudden key changes or chords leading into another scale, but you're not going to suffer through overused chord progressions or the group's using a chord progression they always use. Since, with the exception of their worst pieces on the d'n'b side, they keep their pieces short relative to electronica, they can get away with a more standard batch of chords anyway.

2) Song structure. Most of the time, BMT sets a mood early and develops it in normal ways; again, the brevity of their pieces leans towards this. But they can pull out the oddball, which is especially true on the cymbal'n'bass style they toyed with on two Black Water songs, "Brother" and "The Feeling (Remix)." (The original "The Feeling" is awful. Do not buy.) On the former, cymbals of various sorts (kinda sounds like a Duke-era Phil Collins pattern, to be honest) propel a clean electric guitar/bass/ambience mix along until halfway through the song, where the cymbals drop out, a major synth at half-speed overpowers the mix, and the song continues at the synth's pace with a dub beat and the guitar/bass/ambience still intact. It blew me away the first time I heard it, and it still does. So they don't normally try for points here, but they score majorly when they try.

3) Mood. An A on mood for sure. Their soundscapes are rich and never off-putting even when they're experimental, and they insert mood everywhere they can; even their drum'n'bass pieces tend to be high on mood factor, which is rare for beat-heavy entries in the genre. Especially on Six Million Names, the mood is established so well that the album's lack of melody doesn't kill it, and that's rare in my estimation. These guys know how to set a mood, and they know how to change it from song to song. They're not stuck in one mood, as contrasted with Moby's style of ambience.

4) Layers. The songs are well-layered, but they primarily serve the mood rather than add a countermelody or anything this separate category is looking for. I will say that the group seems inclined towards natural instrument samples; there's guitar and even electric bass all over Black Water, and Producer 03 and Six Million Names are heavy on saxophones. Real instruments add to the warmth of the sound, and by having a definite goal for their layers they use them more effectively than many.

5) Genre-bending. They write equally well in two genres, so they get high marks here. Rarely have they put them together in the same song, but they're consciously moving in this direction, which to me was the missing piece to conquering all they survey.

6) Innovation. For fusing chillout and drum'n'bass together in the first place, they get some innovation points. How many they get depends on how much they set the bar on this fusion. I have high hopes that they out of all similarly situated artists will do just that - "If I Could Tell You" bleeds innovation - but there's a time element involved here.

7) Rhythm. Their chillout rhythms are fairly unobtrusive but appropriate, and their d'n'b rhythms are intricate enough to avoid growing stale, even if their version of it has no jungle or breakbeat influence. The genre fusing of late has showed up primarily in how they handle a beat, so they're growing in this area.

8) Production. They're not pushing the envelope in this area, but they're highly skilled in it and have no trouble creating the mood they want. A definite plus.

9) Album construction. Black Water was intended to have "clubby" singles and Producer 03 wasn't put together by them, but they each flow well given the constraints. Six Million flows excellently, its continuous mix making sense given the brevity of pieces and attempted mood, and that flow is a key component to that album working on any level.

Bottom line is that these guys manage to pour just about everything into mood creation, whether or not that should bring a beat along with it (and they know when that is). But their versatility, fed by a wide range of influences, is what makes them such a vital listen since Black Water came out and especially with the upcoming material.

The band is friendly to YouTube posters, so a decent portion of their songs in my top 200 should be up there. As a newer entry to my Decagon and one whose strength is based off basically 1.5 albums, these guys are only going up, and I strongly recommend ascending with them.