This new Mickey Pearce is giving us feelings. Serious feelings. Mainly the kind that give you night terrors, that you’re not too keen on sharing with your therapist because there must be a limit to how much they can stomach. Both “Softly Softly” and “Tempted” are frankly terrifying. The Artist formerly Known As Shortstuff has given us some great material in the past – mainly along the lines of the bright and bouncy, but his new releases under the Mickey Pearce moniker are excellent. The “Don’t Ask Don’t Get” EP, entrusted to the world by Loefah’s formidable Swamp 81, was the kind of percussion-driven brilliance too itchy to be held down in one genre, and redolent of the kind of eyebrow-raising techno being teased out by Dutch masters such as 2562/A Made Up Sound. Now Swansea label Ten Thousand Yen is managing things on “Tempted/Softly Softly”, and we couldn’t be more satisfied with such a gloriously ghoulish release.
Stream: Mickey Pearce – Softly Softly (Ten Thousand Yen)
Don’t let the title of “Softly Softly” fool you – it’s one aggressive little hound, chewing on your eardrums for six minutes of relentless naughtiness. Sustaining the attention to percussion seen on “Don’t Ask Don’t Get”, “Softly Softly” adds a touch of UK Funky to the dark, techno influenced beats of Pearce’s previous output. These days everyone loves to switch things up midway through the track, alarming your ears with a footwork skitter just when you’d settled into a Chicago house groove. Don’t get us wrong, we love a bit of genre-hopping (see above) and our attention spans are most likely shorter than yours. But there’s something to be said for a track that can hold your attention from beginning to end without breathlessly zooming through every musical style in existence. “Tempted” opens with a drumroll that reminds us of Destiny’s Child’s “Lose My Breath” (because that’s just who we are) but soon enough some strange piano samples are coming out to play with big boy basslines, and before you can say Timbaland the whole thing has accelerated into a battle for your sanity. It’s all over too soon, or just soon enough. Either way, we are totally crazy about this one.
Stream: Mickey Pearce – Tempted (F+ck Tonto Edit) (Ten Thousand Yen)
