Hudson Mohawke 'Butter' (Warp) Released 26/10/09

Hudson Mohawke first came to widespread attention beyond his Glasgow base sometime last year, during the same period that his fellow LuckyMe collective members Rustie and Mike Slott were rising to prominence within the dubstep/hip-hop crossover world. Initially lumped in to a nonexistent scene, quick to be labeled ‘wonky’ and even quicker to distance themselves from the term, the trio’s music shared as many characteristics with the twisted instrumental hip-hop of Flying Lotus as with the increasingly busy and bright products of dubstep’s expansion.

Still, HudMo was always the black sheep of the three – his fantastic Warp debut Polyfolk Dance was stubbornly insistent on remaining impossible to pigeonhole, switching tempos and moods as quickly as his deftly sliced vocal snippets rushed past. With the release of his debut long player, the idea that he could have been categorised as a pure product of the post-garage explosion seems laughable.

To further qualify that statement: Butter sounds like absolutely nothing else. There are reference points, sure, but the sheer ambition of Hudson Mohawke’s vision becomes painstakingly clear by the time the frazzled hair metal guitar solo of opening suite ‘Shower Melody’ bursts into life. Over the course of the next fifty minutes he passes from stroke of genius to bizarre flight of fancy so many times that it becomes almost impossible to form a coherent opinion of the album as a whole.

Little description of what his music actually sounds like is needed – a mere glance at the artwork immediately tells all. Bright, kitsch and gaudy, Butter’s greatest failing is at times also its greatest asset: the production is almost painfully vibrant. Each individual element, each blast of eardrum shredding treble is so demanding of your undivided attention that listening becomes a challenge akin to watching an entire action film whilst standing half a metre from the cinema screen – you’ll probably get the general gist, but by the time the credits roll your brain aches and your attention span is utterly spent. It’s exhausting and as synthetic as the latest mood-enhancing research chemical, yet the entire experience is so much fun you probably stopped caring almost as soon as it began.

And here’s the rub: once it’s been picked up, Butter is as impossible to put down as it is to figure out. The yuppie-muzak of ‘Gluetooth’ is Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities put to tape – a low-slung, decadent grind that suddenly descends into a banker’s hell of grating bass and sandpaper synth – and the fairground roundabout that ‘Fruit Touch’ twists out of shape is dizzying to the point of total disorientation. The record’s final fifteen minutes are a revelation - by the time DaM-Funk’s early eighties R’n’B cameo on ‘Tell Me What You Want From Me’ disintegrates into ‘FUSE’, it’s possible to forgive every early mis-step (the less said about ‘Joy Fantastic’ the better). The slow-burning hum of ‘Star Crackout’ is an unexpected dose of real emotion on an album packed to the rafters with the fake equivalent, and closer ‘Black N Red’ flies past in a skyward rush of endorphins to a breathless finish.

As for a score, it’s impossible even begin to work out how to rate a record like this numerically – but it’s enough to say that this rating is probably entirely personal. Given the sheer breadth of critical reactions thus far, Butter is almost certainly Marmite.