With popular acts like Rihanna and Brittany Spears going to dubstep producers for new tunes and established rappers like Snoop Dogg and Xzibit laying rhymes over dubstep beats, the genre has indeed made it big. Premiere dubstep trio Nero have recently released their first album, Welcome Reality, and with its new found fame, the syncopated beats and wobble bass of dubstep are starting to climb the charts.
With the growth of any genre, you will start to see the fracturing of its foundations. The fans will split, the creators themselves will evolve and develop new sounds that still fit into their original musical mindset. Dubstep is no different. What once started as minimalist, dark, garage-y and grimy on the underground radio scene in the UK has since blossomed into the electronic explosion taking over the studio in many countries around the world. What most of us know as dubstep today is something of a far cry from what I remember dubstep sounding like when I first tried it out (Burial, anyone?)—just FYI, I wasn’t such a fan when I first heard it. Now days, you’ll be hard pressed to enter a club without hearing at least one set of dubstep. Those percussion heavy tracks with their characteristic oscillating bass notes seem to get a lot of people on the floor. This club friendly type of dubstep that I think most people are familiar with is commonly referred to as ‘brostep’. Well, Nero isn’t brostep.
But neither is Nero what dubstep started as. For me, Nero’s debut album Welcome Reality is kind of a new branding of dubstep I almost want to call ‘popstep’. Where brostep is deep and heavy, chest rattling bass and drums beats to chatter your teeth, this popstep style is a lot higher in spectrum and quite radio friendly. That isn’t to say it’s bad, because I quite enjoy the groups first record. I suppose I just found it surprising when I blindly picked up the album because I understood Nero to be one of the biggest names in the dubstep scene at the moment.
Like I said, I actually quite enjoy the album. From beginning to end it’s a great listen—which is how albums are meant to be heard, I dare say. To pick it apart, it has its hits—those songs you want to put on repeat. Songs like chart topper Promises and The Jets cover Crush on You and semi-symphonic Me and You feature poppy instrumentation and female vocals that scream radio single. All mixed with the wobble bass and knee-aching drum beats we adore, and you have popstep. There are the more brosteppy songs on the album like Doomsday and Fugue State which evoke that darker, more pressing feeling. With more powerful melodies and beats that hit harder, it’s like Halloween if it were a music genre. The group has also included more drum ‘n’ bass leanings as well in songs like Departure and Scorpions.
I could listen to Welcome Reality while doing just about anything, it has that quality to it, that good music feeling where you just want to hear it and listen to it and take it in. For someone who is just becoming a fan of dubstep like me, I can recommend this album whole heartedly. Purists might scoff at the more mainstream, poppy undertones of the release and even the group itself, but I think it’s a smashing success and can’t wait to hear more from Nero.
INFORMATION
Nero
Welcome Reality
released 2011.08.12
Tracklist
01. 2808
02. Doomsday
03. My Eyes
04. Guilt
05. Fugue State
06. Me and You
07. Innocence
08. In the Way
09. Scorpions
10. Crush on You
11. Must Be the Feeling
12. Reaching Out
13. Promises
14. Departure
