Album Review: Unbalance by 2562

Dutch producer Dave Huismans flew in from out of nowhere to change the tenor of dubstep in the late 2000s. Beginning in 2007, Huismans released a string of 12” singles and one full-length album under the name 2562, which rejected the oily skank and amateurish techniques of the reigning South London dubsteppers (excluding Burial, naturally) for a sleek, intensely professional design. Initial recordings were spare affairs without much in the way of melody, but 2562 could knock a person out with a beat, forming bits of detritus into artful constructions and then pumping them so full of muscle that they shot like ammunition.

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Dave Huisman's first 2562 album, Aerial, contained a handful of certifiably massive dubstep tracks, but the album was sometimes skeletal to a fault -- not quite featureless, yet dangerously close to it, more akin to a second-tier release from a dub techno label like Echocord. That becomes all the more clear through Unbalance. Everything sounds livelier, more active.

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Like most electronic dance genres, the centrality of anonymity to dubstep has been a bit overstated. The greatest strength of the genre right now is the fact that there's a unique niche for every producer, or at least those who deign to nichedom instead of making their name as a scene-hopping rhythmic polyglot. So there's something weirdly blank about the idea of a producer who, having already burned through a couple of other pseudonyms, decides to make his name as a post-dubstep figure by picking his own postal code as an alias.

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