Heritage - Habstrakt

As good as Habstrakt is at bass house, "Heritage" is a complete nothingburger of a record.

A big name in the contemporary scene, Habstrakt's debut record had dumbells of high expectations tied to it, dumbells it didn't even get close to lifting. Don't let the seemingly lengthy 15-track-long tracklist fool you — "Heritage" still falls just short of 40 minutes, a testament to the amount of filler plaguing it. Perhaps the first half doesn't suffer from said filler, and yet it doesn't achieve what it wants to, either. "Heritage", from the get-go, abandons all hope of intricate atmospheres and themeing in lieu of a wholly club-friendly, danceable style — nothing wrong with it on paper, but in execution, "Heritage" is simply too shallow to be danceable. Oftentimes the production is shallow and lacking in intensity — "Call Me" is a prime example — and where the production excels, the vocal finds itself as shallow instead. The sampling is mildly irritating, the lyricism is superficial, and much of the production just sits by and watches apathetically. I wish I could say I enjoyed the synthwork, or the basswork Habstrakt is normally so good at, and yet I find it very difficult to find something to latch onto in this first section that's not hollow in its motifs and/or message. "Just Like The Rest of Us" marks a turning point in the album's runtime, and from hereon out, Habstrakt's production does seem to get cleaner, taking the spotlight for the back half of the album. Unfortunately, this second movement is where most of the filler comes in. About half of this section is filler — that is quite a big proportion — causing "Heritage" to become fatigued, as the clubby vibe of the first half begins to drain away into diluted house and repetitive ideas. The atmosphere that was promptly abandoned from the beginning attempts to sneak back in through the interludes, but it does a terrible job of doing so, and whilst the atmospheres themselves aren't even that bad, the context in which they are played is rather poor. Not only is this portion tedious to get through — despite the cleaner production and a couple of saving graces — but "Heritage" falls flat on its face structurally, poised to eat its own tail but too tired to do even that.

Habstrakt is genuinely a great producer with some banger tracks under his belt and a sizeable influence over a growing bass house scene, but it seems he left it all at home for "Heritage". Failing to even be serviceable, this record was not a good showing from the respected producer, and I hope he's got something better in store for the future, because this unexciting coalescence of house tunes was not it. Well, I mean, there's nothing godawful on this, but with some godawful tracks "Heritage" probably would have at least interested me more.