Skrillex RecessFollowing a series of niche-carving EPs, Skrillex is now pretty much a household name. That name is associated, for some, with the reinvention of music. For others, it’s associated with a series of noises that sound suspiciously like the shrill tones of a dial-up internet connection.

But, love him or hate him, the electronic whiz with the wild hair has built up a pretty solid reputation with nothing more than a MacBook and a couple of short EPs. His debut album had a lot of anticipatory build-up, and Skrillex needed to make the bass drop pretty damn hard to make the payoff worth it.

Maybe that’s why the release came so suddenly. Last week Skrillex dropped a few hints on his website, posting a download to a mystery app. New tracks began to  unlock themselves to users of the app, to reveal Skrillex’s first full-length album, ‘Recess’.

The opening notes of ‘Recess’ comes in the form of All’s Fair in Love and Brostep, a solid collection of kicking beats that follows neatly along a template established on the ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’ EP. The music fuses a myriad of instrumentals and influences, shot through with samples of spacey dialogue, over which flows the patois-tinged vocals of English underground jungle duo Ragga Twins.

Ragga Bomb continues to channel the duo’s dirty dub/reggae influence, piling layer upon layer of production that sounds, at once, both perfectly executed and suitably grimy and rough around the edges.

Most other collaborations fair less well. Recess (with Kill the Noise and Fatman Scoop) is a fairly straightforward nightclub dance anthem, replacing free flowing invention with a formulaic pattern that becomes repetitive after about 30 seconds.

‘Recess’ loses its way even further on the likes of Lose my Mind and Stranger – which both sound more like pop songs that had a dubstep mix added in post-production rather than genuine dubstep that just happens to be sampling radio-friendly pop music tones.

Meanwhile Coast Is Clear, featuring Chance the Rapper, pushes Skrillex’s music so far into the background that Chance may well be spitting the beats without any music behind him at all.

Worse still are the two tracks on the album that don’t feature any guest collaborators, Doompy Poomp and Fuck That (possibly the most inoffensive and forgettable track on the album, despite the profane title), both of which sound like something Skrillex banged out after mucking around with his laptop for about half an hour. ‘Recess’ suffers from a problem that the lean and strikingly fresh EPs of Skrillex never had: it feels padded out.

‘Recess’ sees Skrillex attempt to push his sound in a myriad of new directions, but surprisingly few of them are all that successful. As a whole the album features less wildly inventive diversions than previous Skrillex releases, and instead feels a little obvious. For once his control of every aspect of the music’s production feels less total, less absolute.

Dirty Vibe is one of the few tracks to genuinely deliver, infused as it is with super catchy layers of samba style percussion and a barrage of hip-hop vocals twisted out of their original shape and moulded into the beat until they become just another element bouncing and pulsating to the maestro’s will.

For ‘Recess’ to have delivered on its expectations there was a lot more of this was needed, but it just doesn’t happen. Skrillex seems to be attempting to subvert expectations, to deliver the unexpected, which admittedly is an admirable goal, but the problem is that you only get one debut album. And unfortunately this is far from the best release Skrillex has put out.

‘Recess’ is available to buy from today. If you want to pre-order, just use this link http://bit.ly/SKRILLEXRECESS. Or you can listen to our stream below: