Conrad Pack - Commandments

Conrad Pack's long-time-in-the-post full length debut for Lost Domain finally surfaces some three years or so after its completion and still manages to sound both supremely fresh and bracingly grotty. I think we can attribute the latter to its period of conception - this is very lockdown sounding music, same-four-wall doolally introspection at 150bpm with a marked k-hole/time-dilation feel (hadn't really considered the ketamin-lockdown interface before, though the comparison bears some fruit - pointless watching the clock if you're not going outside). Pack half-jokingly details the music that makes up Commandments as constituting what they believed at the time was a "world-changing genre" shift, and while I'd not be quite so grand in my assessment, there is a very locked-in quality to these nine tracks that feel highly attuned to their own private universe, giving off the same feel as Rephlex as it's most obstinately outsider (a bit Bochum, a bit AFX, a bit Muziq - wrongheaded in the right kind of way). Leeway and DJ Gonz, other key producers floating around in the Lost Domain/SELN (the label Pack now runs) orbit, also appear here, giving the sense of a tight enclave of artists all determindely facing the same way, not unlike those early forays into grime (there's certainly the shadowprint of eski chill on both 'Downward' and 'Prophecy') and dubstep where for one moment it felt like there was a shared symbiotic moment of transgression. It's a shame we didn't get Commandments when it was fresh-off-the spoon in 2022, but the possibilities it articulates remain a relevant, standalone thrill.