Tom and Ed Russell continue to test various hybrids of techno, UK garage, and for the first time, drum’n’bass, but the EP’s most promising moment looks beyond the dancefloor.
Overmono accompanied their early forays into music-making with dips into their parents’ record collection, which a youthful Tom and Ed Russell would raid to create outlandish mashups with the electronic tunes they were buying. The results may have been “a proper mess,” in their own words, but the idea of musical worlds colliding stuck with the fraternal duo as they developed their signature hybrid style of bass music. Those fusions provide even more direct inspiration for their new EP, Cash Romantic, where drum’n’bass, techno, and UK garage meet head on.
This kind of amalgam isn’t exactly a revelation for Overmono, whose modus operandi—as witnessed on a string of excellent EPs as well as their sparkling 2021 fabric presents mix—consists of combining the slinky sounds of garage and rave with the steel-booted production techniques of modern techno, a technique so effective it has taken them to the top of the UK’s dance ranks. So well have Overmono honed this particular skill that it is perhaps inevitable that the best track on this EP is the most typically Overmono. “Gunk” is a tightly coiled charge of industrial energy that—like “So U Kno” or “Bby” before it—swathes a modulated vocal bearing the expensive perfume of Y2K 2-step in rugged electronic cladding, a two-note synth riff bludgeoning the listener into submission as the voice pursues a more cerebral seduction.
“Gfortune” pushes the boat further out, using a vocal dusted in distortion and lightly bent out of shape to trace an exact midpoint between Overmono’s mechanized tech and Burial’s garage scuffle. The song is agreeably haunting, but Overmono’s rather reverent use of their source material—they employ hefty samples from “2am” by North Carolina’s Joe Trufant—feels uninspired compared to Burial’s ingenious cutups and recontextualizations. Burial’s music has influenced legions, but the number of artists to do anything novel with that inspiration remains frustratingly single-digit.
The EP’s title track, Overmono’s most overt excursion into drum’n’bass yet, faces a similar fate. Much as Burial has mastered the art of being Burial, the rigorous standards of drum’n’bass make it hard to dabble in the genre without coming across as dilettantish. “Cash Romantic” has a satisfying snap to the drums and a bassline that clears out the Eustachian tube like a depth charge, but the song has neither the clinical obnoxiousness of classic techstep (à la Ed Rush and Optical’s “Bacteria,” which Overmono included on their Fabric mix), nor the astral grace of vintage LTJ Bukem productions, another apparent reference point, leaving it a little short on purpose.
It falls to the acrid throb of “Bone Mics” to suggest more fruitful new avenues for Overmono to pursue, debuting a sound that could be genuinely theirs. The track has familiar traces of UK garage and techno, to which the brothers add a hint of IDM, but it lands in uncharted territory between all three. The drums are funky, flexed, and light, neither exactly up- nor downbeat; the vocal snippets are catchy but abstruse; and the bass sits between muscular comfort and weaponized dread. The result is like ambient music for the terminally twitchy.
“Bone Mics” aside, Cash Romantic is a little too neat and tidy to match the far reaches of the brothers’ excursions into their parents’ record collection, where Gerry Rafferty mixed with acid techno and Dr. Hook found company with “weirdo trance.” But the EP does suggest life beyond the peak-hour sets that have become the duo’s bread and butter, prepping a canvas where the club can be an afterthought rather than an imperative, and moving away from the monomaniacal focus on the dancefloor.
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