5 out of 5

Label: WéMè Records

Produced by: ?

Goal achieved: RTR has gathered up all their IDM influences, showmanship, and style flip-flopping, and cooked it to perfection: 727 is their first release where the exuberance doesn’t step on the execution; where the pieces the artist takes from a lot of classic Rephlex influences are funneled into a sound they now own.

The album title works as a reference to the airplane for me – which wiki informs me is known for being noisy, but proved quite popular for shorter international flights, while also finding use for package delivery and even the military. In the analogy I’m building, RTR has shown an ability to scale their music for various purposes, but it’s often unfocused. A flight, though, has a start and finish, and would be for a particular reason, whether commercial or some other industry. This album has that same sense of being a set journey. (We’ll ignore wiki’s mention of Trump and Epstein also both favoring 727s.)

RTR’s IDM BPM wizardry is here, as is their preference for a funky as heck bassline, it’s just tempered to perfection: the album’s sound uses a DMX Krew backbone groove, but then builds on that patiently, both within a song and across the album. Tracks are dense though not distractingly so; each side generally gives us one steady mix, one that’s a bit more atmospheric but bridges into IDM squiggles, and then some RTR flashiness, all bleeps and breaks But the line isn’t that clean, which is the album’s genius: even the slower jams have surprising glitches in the bass, and the tunes that move from comparatively simple to complex juggle multiple rhythms in an impressively controlled way I don’t feel like we’ve consistently seen from RTR. And then the top-down journey is maintained: the A- side feels most directly accessible, while B- and C- experiment a bit more, and the D-side is comparatively reserved. Everything feels in its place.

I’ve been waiting for this. RTR is awesome, but Ive often found their releases either overwhelming or just without a clear agenda. Whether the artist had to get out all the quirks to get here, or this is just another variant on their ever-evolving style we’ll see, but 727 feels like a triumph, and of the type that can make me better appreciate what RTR has brought to the table previously.