In the two-plus years since 2013's With Love, Zomby has experimented with a new mode: silence. Or, at least, relative silence, as the irascible producer has been dormant after keeping a near constant release schedule since debuting in 2007. It's been for the best, really, as London's grime underground, including upstarts like Visionist and Logos, took the genre to new, exciting places just as Zomby's twinkling arpeggios started to feel too familiar. Now Zomby returns, first with a one-off single this summer with grime godfather Wiley and now with Let's Jam!!, a series of two four-track EPs, his first work for stalwart independent XL Recordings.
Anyone hoping for fireworks upon Zomby's return is likely to be disappointed, as Let's Jam!! is slight both by XL's standards and the strictures of dance music 12"s. Zomby has referred to at least one of the tracks here ("Acid Surf") as a "DJ tool"—a simple, repetitive piece meant to aid DJ mixing—and much of Let's Jam 1 proceeds in this manner, offering up slight variations on simple riffs. DJ tools are a common, simple convention, but they usually aren't packaged with promotional airhorns (nor do they tend to come out on XL Recordings, or at least not since the early '90s), so it's fair to assume that Zomby sees these as somewhat more substantial than that term implies.
Locating that substance proves difficult. On Let's Jam 1 Zomby (finally!) abandons his signature sound for something that amounts to a walking tour of early rave conventions—of the early history of XL, coincidentally or not—adding little to the equation. Opener "Surf I" is essentially a harmless electro sendup, featuring a low voice grunting the track's title while short melodic lines phase in and out. The problem is that, even for a low-stakes genre exercise, "Surf I" is badly lacking in dynamism, deploying that same curt vocal sample on the first downbeat of every other measure of the track while a short bassline repeats. It is noticeably repetitive in a realm in which repetition is basically the entire point.
No, if you're looking for the type of subtle shifts and melodic changeups that are part and parcel to the very concept of dance music you'll have to wait for "Surf II", a similar concept but with just enough rhythmic interplay and moving pieces to register as improvement. If for some reason you should want to bridge these Zomby offers aforementioned tool "Acid Surf", which sounds like a parody of Zomby doing an acid track: a zippy 303 bassline, a sample of someone sternly declaring "acid", and lots of airhorn. "Slime", a coarse interpretation of the hoover bass sound, is a far better fit for Zomby's eerie sense of melody.
There's less to say about Let's Jam 2, which returns Zomby to his default style—sparkling synths, fizzy square wave bass, pools of reverb—with diminishing returns. The best of the four tracks, "Bloom", wouldn't sound out of place on Local Action or Keysound Recordings or any of the other London labels releasing lush, forward-thinking bass explorations, but nor would it stand out. (More troublingly, you could say the same about its placement on Zomby's past two albums.) Grime has gotten vaster and braver in Zomby's absence; long reverb tails and gunshot percussion don't quite cut it anymore.
Let's Jam!! does unload some of With Love's portentous conceptualism. It's nice to see Zomby return to the short, understated format under which he's released some of his most potent material; With Love suggested that his gilded, buzzy sound is difficult to scale. No points just for showing up, though, and Let's Jam!! finds Zomby far too conservative working through two distinct periods of UK dance history.
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