Fresh Goes Electro 2

And then he enjoyed it so much he decided to follow it up with a sequel.

Fresh Goes Electro 2 opens with "If You Knew" by Chris Lake. While it has a palpable electro edge, it still holds some of the classic aspects of commercial house. It’s a diplomatic crowd pleaser – it doesn’t sound like every other house song, but at the same time it doesn’t knock with that aggressive, snagged bass you find in most electro. The following song, "Bon Bon", does the same dance: the bass thickens a bit, but there’s nothing that shouts ‘electro’; instead, there’s a steady treble, heavy drums and ascending synths that pile up into a combined effort bobbing somewhere between deep and tribal house. When we get into the third track – "Take Me Away" – it becomes clear that Fresh is spinning a cautious game, here. There’s an element of electro to these songs, sure, but you can just as easily toggle them between commercial house, deep house and dance.

And it’s not a bad strategy: Fresh Goes Electro 2 isn’t about breaking away into new dance territory, it’s about sonic assimilation. It isn’t so much Fresh wooing his 5fm listenership/electro-fiends as it is him drawing them in and easing them into his usual decksmanship – dance-floor scorchers coupled in with the occasional club anthem. Added to that, FGE2 is also about shaking up (the) house a little – inviting in new sounds and seating them in different places: asking them to add their own flourishes and letting them take liberty with the arrangement, so long as they keep the flava familiar and danceable.

So house enthusiasts, you can rest easy – your ears won’t be violently mangled by distorted bass sounds and robots bleeping in sharp space noises. Well, that’s not entirely true – your ears will be mangled, but not violently, and the space-synths and seismic bass grumbles only appear furtively before they bow out and leave you to the rhythmic dance-floor abandon Fresh is known to inspire on the decks.