Since graduating from the Royal Academy of Music with the highest grades yet in the institution’s history, cellist Oliver Coates has confounded expectations associated with such an achievement. Rather than confine himself to a career of classical recitals, he has embraced a wider palette of music to great effect more often than not. This has led to collaborations with artists like Massive Attack, Radiohead, and Mica Levi, but his second solo outing is very much the work of one man. Coates was inspired to make "pumped up body music" as he was fed up with people approaching his gigs intellectually -- he longed to make something that would produce a more visceral reaction. In order to achieve this, he took the rather unusual step of restricting himself to nothing but a cello and a microphone -- recording, snipping, sampling, chopping, and distorting until he hit on the right sound.
Coates wasted no time getting down to business on Upstepping. The opener "Innocent Love" is a slow building yet irresistible marriage of dance and classical music. Its syncopated garage beats create a lo-fi yet insistent tempo that is paired with soaring strings and a rippling bassline to fine effect. "Perfect Love" acts as a companion piece to the fine confluence of styles on "Innocent Love." The fact that the track is 100-percent the sound of Coates' cello is astonishing in itself, but it's also impressive in how it captures the euphoric catharsis of dance music at the same time, and like "Innocent Love," it brilliantly captures the rising build. Whereas that track veers closer to dance music than it does contemporary classical, "Memorial to Hitchens" is a poignant trip into minimalism. Its sparse yet powerfully deep, resonating cello lines offer a darker and more mournful contrast to the elation of some of the other tracks. The record's closer, "Rise and Fall," takes a similar tack. It's brighter in tone than "Memorial," and although it's fairly sparse, the playful cello parts are rich in application and prove to be a soothing and satisfying conclusion. Elsewhere, Coates is even more experimental. The frenzied percussion on "Bambi 2046" is offset by gentle, patient strings. The tone shifts as the bass notes of his cello are introduced and quickly and violently distorted in a move that recalls 2016's excellent Tim Hecker record Love Streams, but Coates' experimentations aren't always quite so successful. The robotic voices and restless musicality of "The Irish Book of Death & Flying Ships" add up to little more than a mildly interesting interlude. Overall, though, Upstepping is certainly a more physically engaging work than his previous record, and yet Coates has still managed to retain an intellectual curiosity. Unsurprisingly, it's a work that has seen him likened to the late Arthur Russell, and on the strength of this collection, it's a deserved comparison. He has undoubtedly succeeded in what he set out to do, and in the process made an instinctual, unaffected record whose pleasures are rich and extensive.