[numblock num=”8″ style=”3″]Like nothing the EDM scene has heard in a long time, “Calamari Tuesday” represents a challenge to artists everywhere to follow Feed Me’s versatility into a new era of innovation. Anyone who doesn’t will surely be left behind, as the British producer’s first full-length album puts his incredible creativity on display for the whole world to see.[/numblock]
Feed Me has long been known for his full-experience live setup. Ever since he began touring with the famous teeth in tow, his live show has been the envy of the electro community. The amount of work that goes into individually syncing every track with the custom made panels of his light show is stunning, leaving one to wonder when the producer better known as Jon Gooch actually has time to make music.
Clearly Gooch was thinking the same thing, as a few months back he informed his fans that he’d be taking some time off from touring to concentrate on creating his new album, as he took a step out of DJing and into a producer role. And so, Calamari Tuesday was born. In a world saturated by big room house that’s starting to blend together into the same sound, Feed Me’s first full-length album throws down the gauntlet with a simple challenge to his fellow producers: Show us something different.
The legendary teeth, live in Seattle (Photo Credit: AJ Apuya Photograph)
Many albums get by and their ability to seamlessly drift from track to track, where a listener barely notices that when one song ends and the next picks up. Calamari Tuesday is not that kind of album. Rather, each track stands alone in its own genre, drifting from tempo to tempo and yet still meshing into a single work. Opening with the aptly named Orion, we get a cinematic build that drops into dark electro, throwing us headfirst into the rest of the album.
What truly sets Feed Me’s first full-length effort apart from its contemporaries is its ability to give the listener a new experience with every track. This is never more evident than in the transition into the second song, Death By Robot, bringing the classic Daft Punk sound that Daft Punk themselves failed to deliver on with Random Access Memories. Complete with autotuned robots warning us of the coming apocalypse, it’s the perfect segue into Lonely Mountain, as we fade back into the epic-scale cinematic feel of the opening. Like a moth drawn to light, it’s a hypnotic offering that puts you on the edge of your seat from drop-to-drop.
Gooch is nothing short of a virtuoso when it comes to genre-mashing. Tracks like Ebb and Flow and Rat Trap set back-to-back help us start the journey out of electro and into bass music, as he runs the gamut from drum & bass to pure trap. Every aspect of bass finds representation, as he skillfully interweaves glitch and dubstep elements into the trio of In the Bin, Fiasco, and Chinchilla.
For one of the more out-of-place tracks on the album, we take a sharp left turn straight into the cleansing indie vocals of Crystal Fighters on Love is All You Got. In any other context, it would feel like a poorly placed vocal interlude in an album otherwise rooted in dissimilar offerings. But Calamari Tuesday is defined by its willingness to toss the listener from one side of the room to the other, jumping from genre to genre as if it’s deliberately showing off its versatility. Gooch reinforces this idea with the disco-glitch of Short Skirt, launching into blaring trumpets and disjointed vocal breaks to create a groovy modern adaptation of a music long-since past its heyday of the 70s.
The end product of Calamari Tuesday is a collection that pushes Feed Me’s adaptability to the limit, while making Beatport’s Top 100 look positively simple-minded. You’d be hard-pressed to find another producer who can successfully cross the kinds of boundaries Jon Gooch effortlessly barrels through on a regular basis. It’s that singular talent that makes this album one of, if not the best full-length to come out of the EDM world in a very long time.
You can buy Calamari Tuesday on iTunes right now by clicking here.
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