Dave Huisman's first
2562 album,
Aerial, contained a handful of certifiably massive dubstep tracks, but the album was sometimes skeletal to a fault -- not quite featureless, yet dangerously close to it, more akin to a second-tier release from a dub techno label like Echocord. That becomes all the more clear through
Unbalance. Everything sounds livelier, more active. Huisman fills the empty spaces, never overstuffs them, and the percussion is practically spring-loaded -- from several angles -- in comparison. The one track that exemplifies Huisman's transition is "Unbalance," the album's centerpiece, which works itself into an increasingly taut ball of tension without quite resolving itself. Its first two minutes consist of synthetic string sustain, a light kind of foreboding fuzz, and a lulling keyboard tone, followed by five minutes of clamping kick drums, seething hi-hats, vocal gasps, and jarring organ stabs that all rapidly dissolve into a cascading twinkle. If house producer
Moodymann, the master of the tease, happened to make dubstep, his productions would probably sound very similar to this.