Ten years is a long time in dance music; few names stay the course, let alone continue to blaze increasingly-spectacular new trails as time goes on. It’s now a decade since Craig Morrison and Graeme Readie, aka Silicone Soul, started unleashing their hallucinatory, emotion-charged outings on Soma, the UK’s longest-running electronic dance label. Their fourth album is their best to date, combining an innate musical knowledge stretching back to psych and out to modern classical with uncanny dancefloor-wrecking suss.
Silicone Soul’s studio visions find Marshall Jefferson and Brian Wilson jamming in the same dream, as bassline-dominated grooves descended from 80s Chicago house and multi-tiered melodies (often played on guitar and keyboards, even recalling The Doors on David Vincent’s Blues) dive into the lustrously-opiated sonic caludrons created with modern studio noise toys. Rarely does dance music pack such an emotional punch, as on poignant opener Koko’s Song (dedicated to a fan who suddenly died) or the sensual Language Of The Soul, which mines the deepest of house seams guided by ghostly whispers. Meanwhile, new single Dust Ballad II shows that, alongside unearthly future symphonies such as The Pulse and Midnite Man, Silicone Soul can still rock the dancefloor to its core. An epoch-making milestone in any genre.
