Album Of The Month: Carl Cox – Electronic Generations – Released December 2022
Full disclosure, I wasn’t expecting much from this one.
In fact, I was more hoping that the new Leftfield album was going to be my album of the month, whereas this release came way out of eeeh… well you know what I mean.
Electronic Generations is the fifth album from Carl Cox, the first one since All Roads Lead To The Dancefloor, which was released way back in 2011.
That album was ok, nothing special and, truthfully, the last few times I’d seen Carl Cox play out I wasn’t exactly blown away either.
Last time around it was during the summer of 2019. The crowd weren’t there to hear Carl Cox, it was all too obvious they’d come to be seen at Carl Cox, who was incongruously dwarfed on a carpark-sized podium delivering a jaded parade of shake-and-bake Beatport “bangers”, including 2019’s most loathsome summer hit…
…You’re losing, you’re losing, you’re losing, you’re losing your miiiiind…
(Losing my dinner more like, were it not for the prohibitive nature of plastic festival toilets teaching me long ago never to eat before raving.)
But that was then, this is now. And Coxy never sits still.
Sure, he’ll ride the trends for a while, but he also puts in the work and is apt to change direction well before the other headline DJs do.
So, in retrospect we all should have seen this coming.
Because just when you think he’s past it, Carl Cox rebounds with his infectious energy and enthusiasm to remind you just how much of a funky motherfucker he can be.
We’d heard Carl talking previously about hybrid performances and how he had started a new label pushing live electronic music. But let’s be honest, none of us really paid much attention to it.
I’ve witnessed Carl play some epic sets in the past, but lately it kinda seemed like he was getting bored of it all. We all were, really; huge venues, short sets, shorter attention spans, Instagram stories and overpriced Pioneers – y’know, business techno.
Then came the lockdown.
Even then he was unstoppable, mixing, live-steaming, even dabbling in drum ‘n’ bass for a little while, but behind the scenes he was also spending more and more time in the studio
Lockdown was all about reflection, about reassessing everything, what do we want to do, what do we no longer want to do, what’s truly important to us?
In Carl’s case it seems he made a conscious decision to get back to basics and remind us all, once more, why he’s the undisputed King of Techno.
Oh Yes, Oh Yes
Electronic Generations sees Carl building steady acceleration off the grid in the eponymous opening track, an 808-driven electro tune with steady arpeggios sporting a definite Coxy flavour.
But then comes the 303 and the message is clear – this isn’t the tech house safety car lap we’d expected. This is a greasy, gas-guzzlin’, analogue-growling, high-octane speedrun.
Track two, How It Makes You Feel, is an off-kilter block of syncopated machine funk that flips between breaks and a steady 4/4 thump.
Next up, Heads Up; a raw Chicago-style jackin’ house track full of aggressive distorted percussion and glitchy deep house claviers.
Our Time Will Come slaps you upside the head with some breakbeats then drops some slinky hands in the air synths before mutating into a straight-up drum-driven stomper.
Toys Out Of The Pram is a minimalist slab of spaced-out modular meanderings, all surfing on a phat 909 and very little else for almost eight and a half minutes. What else do you need?
Bring It Back – again just straight-up no nonsense house music, no vocals, no samples, no bells no whistles, just the big man and his machines.
Another raw and noisy jackin’ house jam, Deep Space X is every bit as deep and spacy as it sounds.
Lokma sprinkles some psychedelic, Middle Eastern flavour atop rich percussive textures and some dark, rumbling sub bass.
Keep The Pressure brings the acid back in a big way, but not much else. Again, it’s just a pure machine workout, jamming on the boxes, tweaking filters, muting parts, adding parts, a high-hat line here, cymbal crashes on a break there, on-the-fly techno as it’s meant to be.
Get After It is another drum and 303 workout, while Line Lock is a ruthless analogue bass assault. Both seem purposely crafted to deliver a much-needed late night pummeling to dark and dingy dancefloors.
World Gone Mad ups the tempo and really ratchets up the high resonant distortion on the 303 to create a tweeter-splintering higher state of tinnitus.
This is the Carl Cox I remember, utterly unrelenting with no mercy shown to the weary dancefloor stragglers. Oh yes, oh yes.
Speed Trials On Acid is a vicious 303 thumper that pays homage to his hardcore roots with a fat, saturated kick hammering skulls as the acid gradually starts to squelch into overdrive.
It’s immediately evocative of early 90s favourites like Public Energy’s “Three O’ Three” or Edge Of Motion’s “Set up 707”.
Move The Crowd once again sounds like it’s come straight from the 90s underground, rather than the tail end of 2022. At one point Carl even appears to wrestle with the machines to keep them in sync. Hardly in keeping with our pristine Instagram era, and all the better for it.
Apollo Beings, meanwhile, has more of a vintage Detroit feel with shimmering arpeggios and more live 909 jamming.
See The Sun Rising is pure loopy mobius strip techno at its finest and one of the standout tracks for me. It’s steady yet uplifting, with crisp percussion and a sidewinding synth line slithering back and forth across a hefty 4/4 kick further augmented by copious helpings of filter and delay.
The album (or at least the digital version) ends with a reprise of Electronic Generations, this time around the 808 is removed and the 303 is muffled, replaced instead by cinematic strings and atmospheric pads. It’s a perfect way to remind of us where we started, book-ending an album that’s pure dancefloor devastation from beginning to end.
As for the remixes, they’re there as a bonus, with a few of Coxy’s crew of collaborators such as Nichole Moudaber and Fatboy Slim, plus a drum’n’bass remix by Chase and Status.
None of these grabbed me as much as the originals, with the exception of the See The Sun Rising Franky Wah remix. This fluorescent makeover features a beefier bottom end, fulsome snare rolls, dreamy pads and Elysian vocal chants that make you want to puff your chest out like Maximus on MDMA.
But rather than triggering my trance-induced gag reflex, the result is a perfect sunrise anthem designed to wring the last remaining joules of energy from festival goers before the nocturnal spell is finally broken and they stare around at the wreckage, all bleary eyed and twitchy, before shambling back to their tents.
Return Of The King
The reign of King Cox has been a long and glorious one.
Sure, the crown has slipped from time to time, but his resolve has rarely faltered.
As an artist it takes hard work to remain relevant and even more to stay on top of your game.
From the early days of acid house, to the Top Of The Pops and the rave generation’s “three deck wizard”, Carl Cox’s career has been a masterclass of reinvention.
1995 saw him deserting his hardcore raver roots for glistening techno purity with his 1995’s F.A.C.T. compilation, followed shortly after by his debut album, At The End Of The Cliché.
Not that the clichés stopped there. The next two decades saw him deftly navigate the fatuous fads of EDM and minimal, only to wind up being labelled business techno.
Carl Cox certainly has good business acumen, but he’s also proper techno.
If you doubt it for a second Electronic Generations is all the proof you’ll ever need. It might well scare away the tourists, but if you’re the type who goes to hear Carl Cox, this might be the best Christmas surprise you’ll get this year.
Long live the king!