EVERY GENRE PROJECT - January 24 - West Coast Breaks

Genre of the Day - West Coast Breaks

Album of the Day - Vegas by The Crystal Method (1997)

Down on the west coast, they got a sayin’. If you’re not breakin’, then you’re not playin’. It’s likely that no human being has ever said this, but perhaps there’s some former DJ of the West Coast Breaks scene who is a budding Lana fan and has actually said this. That may be a strange way to open up this article, but as someone who’s always been infatuated with the west coast, hearing it used in the name of an unfamiliar genre obviously perked my ears. There’s unfortunately a dearth of information on Rate Your Music about it, with just six albums listed on its chart (although it lists 69 releases; does that mean there’s 63 albums that have never been rated? This discrepancy is insane to me) and overall little information on Google as well. RYM”s description of the genre places it as combining early hip hop breakbeats or the breakbeats of… you guessed it… breakbeat with trance and techno. It’s actually insane how life coincides sometimes because I literally just learned about what breakbeats actually are in an electronic music class I’m taking for my minor. I felt marginally more well informed going into today’s album journey, but still quite lost.

Electronic music is fast moving, both in its approach and in its subgenres; trends tend to rise suddenly, die out, get revived, and disappear again. And West Coast Breaks seems to be one of those short-lived, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it genres, rising in the mid 1990s with California producers developing the sound based off of British Breakbeat Hardcore but with crisper and more repetitive production.

So, what does that actually mean as music? I feel as if with this project, I’ve realized that my knowledge of dance music barely even covered the tip of the iceberg, so even though I’ve now listened to several dance genres from hi-tech psytrance to drift phonk to deep house and tried to absorb as much information as one can for a relatively brief daily piece, you realize how distinctive all these different styles are and how much there is to delve in to with each scene. That’s both cool and intimidating; today’s album was good, but perhaps not as accessible as some of the more niche EDM subgenres I’ve now been exposed to. This music is often built on a relatively simple, looped synth riffs combined with the tricky, frenetic percussion of breakbeat, which makes it sound relatively easy to grasp, but I think there’s this very thick layer of industrial influence here that I think at times makes it drag on a little, as some tracks feel as if they overstay their welcome. However, that doesn’t damn the album; I still liked many of the individual tracks. The first track to really grab me was Busy Child, with its squelching bass flanked by sirens of urgency and excellent, slow-release buildups. I liked the industrial, hard-hitting drum pattern of Cherry Twist and its slightly more bombastic production that echoes the title location of Vegas that evokes so much in the mind. I thought She’s My Pusher was a track that brought so much more energy to the forefront than the last couple tracks which feel almost like placeholders.

This album was as much a delve into a very particular scene of EDM as it was a lesson in how we consider music in dichotomous terms so often; many reviews I read were comparing them to one specific big beat pioneer EDM duo, The Chemical Brothers, either casting this album in an unfavorable light compared to the Brothers or arguing for its merit to be placed alongside them. My first thought was that this is clearly such a niche that there’s only one artist for them to be compared to, but really we do it at all levels of talking to music, and any upcoming artist is going to be subject to loads of questions about how they compare to others. It’s how we relate as social creatures, but it’s also a reminder that sometimes we just need to step back and appreciate musicians and their work in their individual context rather than always have to find a parallel.