review
Tom Holkenborg's Junkie XL Comeback Belongs to Last Night On Earth
Nine years away, and Holkenborg's first Junkie XL record since 2012 sounds like it belongs on Last Night On Earth more than it belongs to him.
deepmelodic
Tom Holkenborg wrote A Fluff Scam on a laptop, at his kitchen table, in the gaps between scoring a Netflix series set in Ibiza. He wasn't trying to make a Junkie XL record. Nine years since the last one, and the strongest case for this comeback is how little it tries to sound like one.
It's a delightful record, and we'd put money on where it proves that. Some open-format DJ, somewhere, is going to mix Kelis' "Milkshake" into "No That Ain't Right," and that's the kind of thing that puts a smile on our faces.
His run in dance music covers six albums between 1995 and 2014. The commercial peak of it wasn't even filed under Junkie XL. In 2002 he remixed Elvis Presley's "A Little Less Conversation" for a Nike World Cup advert, and it went to number one in more than twenty countries under the name Elvis Presley vs. JXL. The Elvis estate wouldn't have "junkie" anywhere near their artist's name, so the biggest hit of his career shipped with half of his own name missing from the credit. Then the next decade went somewhere else entirely. Mad Max: Fury Road. Deadpool. Alita: Battle Angel. Zack Snyder's Justice League. Big rooms. Just not dance floors.
White Lines, Netflix's Ibiza-set drama, is what pulled him back. Scoring it put him back in the island's memory, and he started writing on the side, pulling reference from Richie Hawtin's sets and a dance-music playlist built by Simon Astall and Ben Turner, who ran the show's music supervision through their company, Earworm, and who'd spent the season chasing down real nineties rave records for its flashback scenes. What came out of it went to Sasha, an old friend and a working one since 2000, when Holkenborg produced Sasha's Airdrawndagger, "Breezer" among the tracks on it: an album built from mood and space, a long way from the big-beat breaks Junkie XL was making at the time. Sasha wanted the new material for Last Night On Earth. Holkenborg says he wasn't planning on releasing any of it. "They are quite different from the classic Junkie XL sound," he's said of the tracks, "and I never had any intention of releasing them, but when Sasha asked me to, I couldn't say no." He posts under his own name on Instagram, not the Junkie XL alias.
It's four tracks, twenty minutes and twenty-three seconds. "Graziano" opens it at 4:08. "No That Ain't Right" follows at seven minutes, the longest cut on the record by more than two minutes. The title track runs 4:55 after that, and "Drive Forward" closes things out at 4:20. This is Sasha's first release with Holkenborg as an artist on the label rather than the other way round. He started Last Night On Earth in 2011, on progressive house's side of the map, with a decade of its own catalogue behind it by the time this record landed, and a monthly radio show well past its seventieth episode. This record leans on that history more than on the Junkie XL discography that stopped in 2012.
Putting the longest track second instead of last is worth sitting with. It's closer to the front of the record than the back. We'd take that as the tell rather than the accident. A composer saves the biggest cue for the end. A DJ puts it wherever the set needs it, and that's rarely last.
None of it reaches for 2002. We're calling that the record's strength. A producer who spent a decade scoring somebody else's scenes came back to see if he could still hold a room that isn't watching a screen. He isn't claiming he's found it again either. Around the release, he said flatly that he wasn't sure where the record left him in dance music. Not exactly the line of somebody selling a comeback.