- On his third album-as-diary, the UK home music star tries to attraction to everybody and finally ends up stranded in the course of the street.
- There’s one thing concurrently flashy and introspective about Fred Gibson. His music is supposed to be intensely private: bite-sized home tracks with diaristic names, primarily based round voice memos, cellphone calls and samples of his favorite songs. It is as becoming for the competition stage as it’s for listening to in mattress. He additionally has an apparent aptitude for efficiency, with an notorious finger drumming routine and different stay tips that dazzle his audiences. (Notably, this summer time’s Boiler Room London video racked up hundreds of thousands of views in simply over per week.) He is amassed a big fanbase that goes far and past dance music heads, and has collaborated with everybody from 4 Tet to Ed Sheeran to Swedish Home Mafia. He is an unassuming celebrity with shiny, catchy music that appears designed to please everybody.
Precise Life 3 (January 1 – September 9 2022) is the third in a sequence of albums documenting Gibson’s life because the starting of the pandemic. All three data weld private artifacts to beats that farm the fertile crescent between sweetness and melancholy, the sort of stuff that might wow a crowd throughout a sundown. This third one, although, comes within the wake of accelerating fame and a spotlight, and although it is loaded with snippets of chatter, the private has been changed with the generic. Right here Gibson rifles via present songs and samples them wholesale, as a substitute of weaving collectively new melodies or verses from his travels and relationships. This does not must be a nasty factor, however hearken to first single “Danielle (smile on my face)” and you may hear a half-baked remix of 070 Shake’s “Nice To Have,” with all of the nuance of the vocal flattened out right into a galloping Overmono-lite beat.
To his credit score, Precise Life 3 has loads of swoon-worthy moments: “Delilah (pull me out of this)” beams with childlike marvel and creativeness, whereas “Kelly (finish of a nightmare)” and “Bleu (higher with time)” pop with the pneumatic rhythms and samples of the most effective post-dubstep tracks. However too usually, it appears like Gibson has lobotomized his supply materials. He says he selected the vocal for “Kammy (like i do)” as a result of he thought the road “Nobody can love you want I do” was suffocating quite than romantic—however his monitor has all of the emotional pressure of a Uniqlo dressing room. After which there’s “Clara (the evening is darkish),” a cloying track primarily based round a hymn that might really feel onerous to swallow coming from even probably the most mawkish EDM stars. Ditto for “Winnie (finish of me),” which could possibly be Gibson’s shot at a marriage first-dance track, however the track’s weepy lyrics do not match the misty-eyed instrumental. It is onerous to inform if it was meant to be unhappy or joyous, and it feels empty as a substitute.
Gibson is undeniably an enormous expertise, first catching the ear of his household’s neighbour Brian Eno when he was simply 16. In only a few years he is blazed a path throughout the mainstream and the underground in a manner that few of his friends have been in a position to. Anthemic dance music is second nature to him, and also you get the sensation that he can whip up these tracks together with his eyes closed. However in his quest to attraction to as many individuals as doable, to make the private common, the standard of his music has suffered: what as soon as felt like an intimate glimpse into his life (“Jessie (i miss you“) and friendships (“Marea (we’ve lost dancing)“) now has the texture of an organized backstage meet-and-greet. Gibson’s earlier work blended pop mastery with real feeling. Precise Life 3 is the Hollywood remake, with not-quite-convincing lookalikes and a script laden with clichés.