Cheap Thrills - Effin

There are plenty of bizarre genre cocktails out there, but Effin's destructive fusion style of dubstep and '50s/'60s club might just be one of the strangest.

The Effin aesthetic is in full force in his debut album "Cheap Thrills", a blunderbuss of crushing briddim and meandering bops. Effin's sampling is as good as ever, and when you combine that with his thick basswork, you start to understand why he's so beloved in bass music circles. "Cheap Thrills" is just an extrapolation of that style—a stoic pillar of his discography, an encapsulation of what he aims to achieve with his gimmick, an intense 44 minutes of everything the Effin project stands for. What "Cheap Thrills" also is, however outlandish, is a combo deal packed with all the modernity of the dubstep scene and all the goodies of the 1950s club sampling, and whilst it might feel, on paper, like a bastardization of the latter, Effin dedicates full tracks to the clubby feel-good style, allowing the laid-back vibes to mingle with the aggressive briddim in quite a classy fashion. Suffice to say, I love this gimmick—it's just so damn creative, and having had an established style in it already for years, it was about time Effin made a full-blown project for it. Honestly, "Cheap Thrills", overall, holds up pretty well. But I also can't say I'm a big fan of the overall mixdown of the project. Oftentimes, it's overly harsh, abrasive, or just generally muddy, which—obviously—doesn't feel very good to listen to, nor is it digestable. "Cheap Thrills" misses that extra polish that could have given it a top-of-the-range tracklist, because although the club side of this project is wondrously good, the actual dubstep falls a bit flat. The briddim ideas could be better, too—but as they stand, there isn't a track from this project that stands out to me. It's consistent, sure, but there were no actual hits, no thrilling moments, nothing truly memorable. 

When it comes down to it, "Cheap Thrills" still holds under pressure. And yet, I can't shake the feeling that Effin's debut album is not all it's cracked up to be. Aside from the mixing—which, at points, can honestly be overlooked thanks to the sampling and the sheer intensity—I strongly feel like Effin missed a structural trick. "Cheap Thrills" is quite disjointed and slightly nonsensical in its structure, and the "Interlude" doesn't help much either (despite being a fantastic track in its own right), and so I think with a little more care given to the tracklist to allow certain tracks to pop out (and the mixing), Effin's got one hell of a project in him. Still, "Cheap Thrills", despite its flaws, is nevertheless good enough to find itself on the edge of the 70/100 range.