Halls – 'Ark' review
Albums containing a series of virtually identical songs tend either to be entrancingly consistent, transporting the listener to a perfectly formed soundworld of the artists’ own, or frustratingly samey, leaving you overstimulated by and slightly lost within a landscape of ever-repeating features.
Unfortunately, firmly on the “more ideas needed” side of this split lies Ark, a project by 21-year-old bedroom producer Sam Howard, whose tastefully arranged post-dubstep clearly yearns to be bleak and crystalline like The xx’s or James Blake’s best work, but whose choices of textures and musical touchstones – cavernous reverb, skittering beats, submarine sonar beeps – are so standard-issue and well worn by this stage in dance music’s recent history that the whole album sounds more like tastefully compiled library music than the work of someone wanting to express their individuality. With little attempt at subversion, Ark is remarkable solely for achieving what most UK bass music hasn’t in the last year – to be simply rather boring.
3/10
