Overmono take their name from a suburb of their Welsh home town. You could take that as a knowing joke from a duo steeped in wilfully urban-sounding music, who specifically intended their celebrated 2021 Fabric Presents mix to evoke a winter’s night in south London. The idea of the authors of So U Kno, the reliably party-starting anthem that soundtracked the return of clubs and festivals after lockdown, naming themselves after a rural Welsh faubourg where, one assumes, there’s not much in the way of nightlife, is the dance music equivalent of a death metal band naming themselves Bourton-on-the-Water, or an anarchist punk collective called Little Missenden.
Or perhaps not. The Russell brothers only started working together after they had established themselves as producers in their own right: Tom as Truss, making punishing techno that found a home on Perc’s hard-edged Perc Trax label; Ed as the breakbeat-fuelled Tessela, his 2013 single Hackney Parrot the kind of undeniable tune that effortlessly crosses between scenes, a hit at grime nights and house clubs alike. But the music they make together seems weirdly informed by their rural roots. A decade older than his brother, Tom grew up on 90s mixtapes from Fantazia and World Dance, in an era when the music at those raves had split into two factions: jungle on one hand and the relentless four-four kick of happy hardcore on the other. But in a pre-internet age, Monmouth was apparently so far removed from the action as to render that factionalism – or any of the other boundaries that sprang up in 90s dance music – meaningless. “We didn’t have any ideas about where the music was from or how it was it made,” Tom told an interviewer last year: locally, all dance music was known by the catch-all title “rave”. Existing on a diet of records scrounged from his brother, or listening to him DJ through the wall, Ed was further removed still.
Clearly the pair cling to that prelapsarian, ignorance-is-bliss mindset. You could hear it in their Fabric Presents mix, which created an impressively linear and lucid whole out of eclectic ingredients: old jungle anthems next to banging 3am techno and 2-step garage, Jamaican dancehall crew Equiknoxx alongside Ed Rush and Optical. And you can hear something similar in the sound of their debut album. Unlike their 2022 EP Cash Romantic – which lurched, pleasingly, between drum’n’bass, electronic abstraction, 2-step and the trance-influenced Gunk in 20 minutes – Good Lies doesn’t veer dramatically between sub-genres. Instead, it builds on the blueprint laid out on So U Kno – included here and still sounding incredibly fresh, its potency undimmed by its dancefloor ubiquity – distilling their wide-ranging tastes into a coherent sound that subtly incorporates a panoply of inspiration.
The most obvious influence is garage. Cleverly warped, infuriatingly catchy vocal samples – from sources including alternative singer-songwriter Tirzah, rapper Slowthai and British Algerian soul singer Miraa May – litter the album. As on So U Kno, 2-step beats fuel Is U and Calling Out: the trademark skip of their rhythm also seems to infect the breakbeat on the title track, the downtempo Walk Thru Water and the four-to-the-floor pulse of Calon. But there’s something about the beats Overmono use – a combination of distortion and ferocious punch – that seems rooted not in garage but the tougher end of techno, a genre you can also hear echoed elsewhere: the metallic quality of the bass on Is U, the explosion of noise that erupts midway through Cold Blooded, the increasingly fierce acid line that overpowers Sugarrushhh.
The atmosphere is frequently brooding and foreboding – like Burial, Overmono are good at setting a snatch of R&B vocal against a background that leaves it sounding ineffably melancholy – but it’s tempered by a melodicism so rich you’d be frankly amazed if pop A&R men, keen to avail their charges of a little edge, aren’t on the phone enquiring after Overmono’s availability within hours of the album’s release. Nor, as the title of Sugarrushhh suggests, are they afraid of rave-y uplift. Dramatic, trance-y synth stabs weave through closer Calling Out. About three minutes in, the beats drop out and the track takes on the quality of a hands-in-the-air breakdown. Something that sounds like a drum roll appears, but rather than kicking back in, it slowly dissolves: a euphoric drop, intriguingly twisted to Overmono’s own ends.
A consistent album rather than a collection of tracks – or worse, a handful of big tunes padded out to album length with filler – Good Lies is filled with moments like that: you can spot the influences, but they’re always passed though a filter, presented in an original way. Perhaps that’s what happens if you spend your youth hearing dance music from a distance: you develop your own unique take on it by default.
This week Alexis listened to
Durand Jones – Lord Have Mercy
Rooted in classic soul but far from self-consciously retro: the raucous, distorted, guitar-heavy climax in particular is completely thrilling.
