Duck : Logical Fallacy

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Duck – Logical Fallacy (Fresh Poulp)

Emerging from French Dub/Electronica/D’n’B/Trip Hop specialist NetLabel ‘Fresh Poulp’; Duck, or possibly ‘DucK’, is a purveyor of ‘Electro-Dub’, apparently, which as a sentence is jam packed enough with relatively meaningless genre definitions to satiate even the most determinedly anal and organised of souls.

Anyway, what we’ve got in ‘Logical Fallacy’, ignoring the classifications for a moment, is an album of sporadically enjoyable electronic beats which maneuvers strictly in the currents of convention and predictability. As Electro-Dub, or whatever you want to call it, this sort of music is a true staple of the online world and one which shows absolutely no sign at all of waning in the near future and, in a sense, that’s no bad thing. Sure even within this album you can see mirrored the usual habit of such things to include a lot of ‘filler’ music, which is to say tracks which are so generic that you would struggle to tell it apart from any of its siblings in the great big family of Creative Commons electronic music but even bearing that homogenaity in mind there are degrees to these things. And with a dash of style and a little luck, Duck gets things right here.

As hinted in a general sort of way this album does have a fair few indifference inspiring moments to it where it’s a struggle to pay close attention but amidst that, admitedly very well produced, bulk of tradition there are more than a couple of interesting moments layered on top. It’s an odd juxtaposition which sees the relatively mundane if not particularly objectionable bits giving way to elements of World Music inspired strings and vocals, or even far more minor effects which slip out from between the cracks of convention. I know there’s nothing new about crossing Dub or any of its derivatives with World Music of course and I wouldn’t say that this is cutting through into new territory but where the mix is shown it comes out well and rather makes me wonder why more use wasn’t made of ideas which were clearly present and which could well have differentiated this album further from its peers.

Beyond that though the production is none too bad, which is to be expected from a NetLabel like Fresh Poulp who, from what I’ve seen, can pretty much guarantee a certain level of quality with whatever they’re putting out, even if what they put out does stick to fairly safe ground. And I won’t attack Duck or this album too harshly because even that hesitation on safe, conservative ground doesn’t alter the fact that it’s doing what it does well. If that’s enough to merit real attention I can’t really say, for me this album’s unlikely to ever develop into more than a space filler at the back of my collection, perhaps dragged out on rare occasion to fill a gap in the day but perhaps that’s enough to merit a download in itself. So that’s a bit of a shrug in summary then.

Download ‘Logical Fallacy’

Duck’s Website (French)

Duck’s MySpace

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