VISCERAL/THE AH TRACK

The found-sound clanks of ‘New Haven’, the rolling garage of ‘My Friends Will Always Say’ or the soulful breaks of ‘Some Day My Queen Will Come’ – the genre-jumbling back catalogue of FaltyDL is a dizzying delight. Hat doffed to a great 2015 then, notably a shimmering junglist solo outing as Drew Lustman and his return to the dancefloor for ‘Rich Prick Poor Dick’ earlier this autumn.

‘Rich Prick…’ was a thudding club stomp that shuddered the fillings from your rotting teeth. ‘Visceral’, then, comes as a surprise, not least with the uncomfortable realisation that it’s nothing like its name. ‘Visceral’ centres around an orchestral melody, almost adolescent in tone, that reminded me of the gentle theatrics of Plaid. Unlike those aforementioned teeth, this tune glints in the light, and is almost mathematically neat. The beat trips over itself later on, leading to a messier interlude that allows spatial dynamics typical of his previous work on In The Wild, but then, polish my gnashers with a toilet brush, the melody’s back, overriding things, making things safe, so fresh and so clean.

Although also orchestral, ‘The Ah Track’ on the flip side is more about the beat. Its two-chord lead sashays across frequencies with beautiful confidence, leaving the busy cymbals to drive the energy forward. It’s an earworm. I wonder if this should have been the lead track. Album number four beckons at Falty towers, and such variance between ‘Rich Prick…’ and ‘Visceral’ offers little clue of what’s to come.