Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Scuba: Personality
"Berlin-based UK producer Paul Rose eschews dubstep on his third Scuba LP, using prog house, trance, big beat, rave, old techno, and synth pop to create something stylishly retro."
7 / 10
Dubstep’s ambassador to Berlin, Paul ‘Scuba’ Rose is a living interface between UK bass music and Berghain’s austere dub-techno. ‘Personality’, his third album, conforms to type, while confounding expectation. Less moody than you might expect (if nowhere near as fluffy as his controversial 2011 banger, ‘Adrenalin’), it reverberates with ’80s electro, ’90s house and post-dubstep’s purple synths, but within a sonic framework that evokes everything from monastic purity to claustrophobic intensity. This is dancefloor ecstasy as a brutal, serious business. Which is exhilarating, even if, ‘Personality’ lacks the emotional complexity of closer ‘If U Want’.
Tony Naylor
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