Blawan - Wet Will Always Dry

Is six years a long time in techno? Jamie Roberts isn't one to sit on his hands, but someone Wet Will Always Dry is still the only album to be put to the Blawan name. In operation since 2010 - which is now officially a long time ago in anyone's terms - there's enough 12s to have a satisfied a full length more than a few times over. Why these songs became an album instead of being released piece-meal across various singles I can only guess at, but it still acts as a great calling card for Roberts' muscular, often pretty-fucking-aggy production style, a torch-carrier for the industrial techno pioneered by Karl O'Connor and Anthony Child a few decades prior (also officially: a long time ago) and more than a touch of that mid-period Perc sound. If Wet Will Always Dry represented a continuation of a lineage, it was also a fair bit more than that too. Roberts has always been a merry prankster (that acerbic northern wit knows when to take a bite), rattling stacks and cages with equal glee, and there's a great attention to detail that ages these tracks well - the Terminator two-step stomp of 'Stell' is a dyed-in-the-wool hit no two ways about it, six years back, now or six years on. So yeah, six years is a long time in anything, but it's immaterial when you've always had your head in the future. 'Classic'