Hit the Lights

Stone-faced album "Hit the Lights" sees Monty bring his cold, resolute style to a full-length record.

Something about "Hit the Lights" feels rather ghostly. Perhaps it's Monty's style of echoing melodies over deep basslines, perhaps it's the largely instrumental quality of the tracklist pushing through the minimal sampling that befits it - but certainly "Hit the Lights" is not necessarily built to impress, more to immerse. And it does well at that, too. Monty's well-established style of liquid drum n bass takes the reins for the better part of the album, with its skittering drums and luminous synthwork, imposing consistent, fast-paced rhythm onto the sound. And with the added musical prowess of fellow 1985 producers like Alix Perez and Visages, the production quality standard sets itself quite high.

"Hit the Lights" doesn't compromise on variety, either. Aside from drum n bass, Monty stirs the pot with some UK-flavoured filth - deep basslines and gritty atmospheres - in old-school dubstep tracks like "Ancient" or "Dreamer" or even the aggressive grime cut of "Hardware", casting fearful shadows on what would otherwise be quite a mellow DnB record. Where the illumination of bright synthwork and upbeat energies flicker and wilt, something more unsettling takes its place; where the darkness of the tracklist is a thickly-laid veil, rays of liquid funk alchemy still pierce through. Ethereal sampling blurs with murky basslines, and the result is something tangibly unsettling, something half-real and all the more haunting for it.

On the whole, naturally, "Hit the Lights" benefits from its diversity. And yet it doesn't quite draw enough from it. Though liquid drum n bass is his preferred style, Monty diverges very little from what seems to be his 'formula', leaving much of his DnB deriving from the same sound design, the same song composition ideas, the same lead motifs, over and over again for much of the tracklist. Even if the intermittent heavier track ensnares the spotlight for a few minutes, it finds itself surrounded by an ocean of ultimately quite similar drum n bass. Perhaps it's well-produced - and, indeed, Monty is a well-rounded producer, and most of "Hit the Lights" feels intentionally composed - but this is a project that finds itself struggling to maintain consistent engagement throughout its runtime, particularly for an album that seems to be indecisive on whether it should target a more atmosphere-driven or bass-driven sound.

It seems to me that Monty laid a couple too many traps for himself in the making of this record, and then he promptly fell into all of them. "Hit the Lights" has no shortage of atmospheric sensibility or underground aesthetic, something I greatly appreciate, neither does it have many technical issues or poor songwriting decisions. But the indecisiveness is a killer - in attempting to be two different albums balanced as one, "Hit the Lights" finds itself fractured.