3 out of 5

Label: Warp

Produced by: Richard D. James

It’s one of those situations which could not not divide opinions: a madly influential artist who undeniably helped define a big chunk of the electronic music scene and whose last couple of releases – thanks to MTV exposure –  had grabbed him a much wider audience; a double-album release coming along after a relatively long pause in the artist’s career; a release which might not’ve seen the light of day in its current form if not for a laptop with (presumably) its contents plus oodles more being stolen.  ‘Tis a recipe for: it’s genius! / it’s disappointing! cries, and it surely happened that way.

I was one of those MTV kids who bought Come To Daddy.  Thankfully, I was also one of those obnoxious music collectors who would go all in on the artists he collected, and so by the time of Drukqs, my Aphex catalogue was pretty deep.  Deep enough that I recognized how often James had ducked and dodged expectations, so the collective general sigh this album merited puzzled me somewhat.  Didn’t we know by now that James wasn’t going to give us what we wanted?  But, in a way, that was the problem with Drukqs: we expected something new, and the discs don’t necessarily seem to provide that.  Instead, we seem to get nibs of various times and places for the Aphex / AFX career: d&b extensions of Windowlicker; classic Ambient Volume 1 Aphex groove; caustic techno Analogue Bubblebath explorations…  There are evolutions of the symphonic compositions from the Richard D. James album and …I Care Because You Do, represented as the ‘acoustic electronics’ which sometimes label mate Pierre Bastien would champion.  The sole “new” member of the crew are the Satie / Cage piano tracks, though these are generally minor additions (as per the influences) amidst the drum rushes, so it’s understandably hard to rally around them as saving graces.

There’s also a sequencing issue, primarily affecting disc 1.  Because there are so many different styles, Drukqs becomes more a collection of random tracks than an album, and while disc 2 successfully bounces between the various moods, disc 1 struggles for its pace, with dance tracks broken up by the odd recording or two before the final few tracks plunge us into experimental noise and underwhelming piano.

So though I was loathe to admit it at the time, I do get it: the album just doesn’t feel like the even that it should.  However, time, that tricky bastard, gives us the patience to reflect.  Approaching Drukqs as a smattering of songs instead of something meant to be appreciated as a whole, I think we definitely missed that there was a lot of change evident here.  Had the minimalist compositions and the acoustic tracks been collected together, for example, it would’ve /could’ve been a masterpiece – something with actual penetrable emotions.  The drum / drill & bass work is similarly impressive, showing an insane mastery of cut and paste that surpassed James’ skillfull application of the same on Windowlicker.  And many of the remaining tracks surely form the template for the Analord releases that would later pop up.  30 tracks, song for song, Drukqs is impressive.  But it’s presented together, and we listen to it together, and that’s where it breaks down.  Thus my rating is somewhere between the past and the present: the acceptance that the release’s fractured nature makes it a less relistened-to Aphex album, but that each individual track is still evidence of the artist’s undeniable compositional genius.