The Answer Is In The Beat

v/a: Break Corps 2 (Norm Corps, 2021)

March 22, 2021 at 8:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

As someone who’s been into breakcore ever since DHR’s heyday, I’m always curious about the current state of the genre, and if anyone’s actually doing anything new and innovative with a loosely defined style that’s nearly three decades old at this point. This comp doesn’t really suggest that any seismic shifts have happened within the past decade, but as long as one has a taste for big, stoopid breaks and rapidfire samples, the formula still has its charms. Ravey synths and lo-bit chiptune textures never seem to go out of style in this field, and somehow people are still getting mileage out of that “Babylon Bwoy” sample. CDR is the oldest-school artist here, and his videogame-ish track is typically fun and explosive. Kazuma Matsui’s two appearances are more like math-rock songs with breakbeats, which is a bit refreshing. Golden Boy’s “Connect the Dots” starts out sounding like classic gabber, but quickly downs some happy pills. Another track takes Technohead’s “I Wanna Be a Hippy”, showers it in distortion, and bonks it over the head with a comically large cartoon hammer for a while. NANORAY continues their run of super joyous, neon-flashy releases with two more fun tracks. goreshit’s “mina” is one of the more refined, ambitious, and even serious tracks here, but it still has a hopeful drive to it. Two shorter tracks near the end douse anime/J-pop tunes in ear-bleeding distortion and violent breakbeats. So yeah, nothing drastically setting this apart from internet breakcore comps from a decade ago, but I’m a sucker for this stuff so it’s all fine with me, especially if it’s a name-your-price DL.