Still riding the hype wagon after delivering one of the year’s most iconic tracks in ‘Getting Me Down‘ (not that many of us were lucky enough to get a copy), Blawan puts his collection of 90s acapellas firmly away for his second release on R&S. Almost a 4/4 counterpart to the genre-resistent broken beats of that ‘Bohla EP’, ‘What You Do With What You Have’ and ‘Vibe Decorium’ both maintain its theme of factory-forged dancefloor mayhem designed solely to give club rigs, club fittings and clubbers themselves a real going over.
Again completely eschewing atmopsherics or unnecessarily complicated structure, the former track weaves a heavily overdriven 128 BPM techno groove around the titular vocal hook; the cascading resampled chord sequence and sprinkling of 303 might be all we get in the way of harmonic content, but the (unsurprisingly) clever treatment and deployment of that darkly seductive vocal ensures the track is distinctive enough to stand out in even the most dense of early hours sets.
On the flip, ‘Vibe Decorium’ is slower, more hypnotic and closer via the wooden tone of its beats to earlier Blawan output, but this is nevertheless another 4/4 percussive workout with pride in its own parsimony first and foremost. As with all tracks of this sort, of course, they live or die on their sheer impact and in both cases here the effect is churning, monstrous and irresistible. Prosaic, loopy bangers they may be, but when the loops are as tough and well executed as this, they’re indispensible club weapons.