Pendle Coven – Self-Assessment
Modern Love, 2009
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Self-Assessment will live happily among your Quantec, Andy Stott, and Echospace albums. Throw it into a playlist and you might even confuse it with a few Chain Reaction tracks. After several polished 12”s that nearly pinned the duo under the long shadow of Basic Channel, Britain’s Gary Howell and Miles Whittaker have delivered a good long-player. In fact, it might be a little too good.

Opening with a short burst of generic ambience and ending with a hidden track of more of the same, Self-Assessment’s artistic drones and squeals signal that this is a proper album rather than a mere collection of singles. Six of the tracks come from previous 12”s, five are brand new, and the sequencing here follows the spirit of the album title, working like a carefully arranged inventory.

After the “Aged Drone” introduction fades away, a graceful bassline surfaces in “Iamnoman,” moaning like the wind outside the door and accompanied by little more than a relentless basketball drum, a few galloping high hats, and some judiciously positioned bits of hiss. This is minimal techno at its most skeletal and in a less generous mood you might call it underdeveloped. “Unit 6” shapes these same elements into a catchy bit of low-rider dub designed for the trunk, while “Uncivil Engineering (Calm Mix)” and “Optimal” are brighter, sleeker tracks built around airy chords. The production sparkles and everything is in the right place, yet there’s something remote about these first four songs. Cold isn’t the word for it, because Modern Love records are designed to be a little frosty. No, it’s joyless.

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Pendle Coven – Modern Mode

Track six changes this. “Modern Mode” bounces into the stereofield with a wide-swinging bassline so big and gutsy that for a moment I expected to hear the “House of Jealous Lovers” chorus or some other caffeinated disco-punk refrain. Pendle Coven choose a different route, of course, going down two paths rarely traveled successfully at the same time: by pairing a synthesizer melody of Model 500 vintage with a persistent swelling chord, the parallel lines of narcotic ambience and a bone-rattling physical groove are disorienting and irresistible. This is the centerpiece of the release, making way for the elegant deep house shimmer of “Nice Moves” and “MVO Chamber”, which barrels through classic Basic Channel territory. Again, the production is impeccable. Not a stitch is dropped and every ‘t’ is crossed.

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Pendle Coven – MVO Chamber

There’s the old saw (and beer marketing slogan) that perfection has a price. The upshot is that Self-Assessment delivers several exciting new moments in dub techno and it’s one of the most seamless fusions between the two genres in recent years. While many producers are content to simply crank the reverb to eleven, Pendle Coven provides each track with ample breathing room and every click and kick receives plenty of care. However, such painstaking precision exacts a cost: I’d rather put these tracks behind glass than dance to them.

I can’t tell you that they should have done anything different – I can only point to the final track on the album: “Exigen” is an epic construction filled with tangled ribbons of delayed keyboards, clattering drums, and a sweaty counter-melody that not only builds upon the key features of dub techno, it injects just the right amount of joy into the machine.

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Pendle Coven – Exigen