Breach – Jack

Label: Dirtybird

Breach, aka Ben Westbeech, has been mighty busy lately. Along with a couple of collaborations, with Midland and Dark Sky, his Naked Naked imprint has been seeing a steady release schedule of big-room house tracks. With this prolific output has also come a change in the producer’s style, with a notable movement towards mainstream house tunes that also sound a little generic compared to the producer’s early output. Some of his newer tracks, such as the storming You Won’t Find Love Again, are such addictive bodyjackers that this ceases to matter, but on the other end of the spectrum his work today rarely sounds as innovative as Fatherless did back in 2010.

This exact dichotomy is present in Westbeech’s latest, a suitably sensuous pair of cuts for Claude Von Stroke’s crowdpleasing Dirtybird imprint. A-side Jack is pure gold, the looped vocal inciting the floor to dance is sure to turn heads, while the dirty low end progression and straight-edged 4/4 combine to form a simple but irresistible stomper that’s sure to get a lot of playtime in clubs. It’s basic but ruthlessly effective, combining unsophisticated house tropes with overtly sexual vocals that fit in perfectly with the UK’s current turn towards eroticised deep house sounds.

B-side Let’s Get Hot bears more than a passing resemblance to Westbeech’s recent Dark Sky collaboration The Click, from the descending bassline leading to the drop to the curiously unadorned beat pattern that leaves the overall sound more than a little hollow. Here the simplicity hasn’t paid off, the whispered vocals sound derivative and tuned, ricocheting toms do little to conceal the lack of substance to this simplistic roller. The package also comes with a Dub, which is a straight-up carbon copy of the original sans vocals. It all amounts to an oddly disaffected package from Breach, showing both the positive and negative results of adopting a more popular, mainstream sound; unless you score by making it pitch-perfect, you end up with nothing at all.

5.5/10