Double Cup

You will be hard-pressed to find a fresher-sounding dance LP this year.

Emerging as an outgrowth of Chicago house music, the principle formula is one that combines bubbling 808s and low end with angular snare patterns and looped snatches of vocal samples. It can often prove a jarring prospect in the first instance, but DJ Rashad’s Double Cup is a coherent and appealing starting point for the curious.

Everything seems to be malfunctioning on the album, and yet, Rashad loves the genres he borrows from so much, he can't ignore the solid grip of acid house ("Acid Bit") or the sweet slide of R&B ("She a Go"). These sparking satellites all remain in their respective groove's orbit, making Double Cup footwork's most sensible and revisit-worthy album to date.

Something about the music's rhythmic flexibility, the paradoxical slippage between half-speed, double-speed and triplet grooves, allows almost anything to be folded in to its matrix without altering its essential character. [Oct 2013, p.57]

Double Cup sounds like an album Rashad has been gearing up to make, but instead of abandoning the footwork style he has championed throughout his career, he’s scoping its potential on nonconformist terms. And from the perspective of the listener, it’s an absolute treat.

A much more concise statement than last year's Welcome To The Chi, Double Cup is an exciting portrait of a maverick artist with complete creative freedom, and the skills to hold it all together.

Underneath the jarring keyboards and jerky percussion is a delicacy gives the LP international appeal, one that means it won’t be confined to cars and packed warehouses.

It’s the sound of the genre at its most bonkers, with the scene’s most brazen producer churning out never-before-heard sounds that range from the acid-ghetto-house of ‘Acid Bit’ to the footwork/jungle hybrid of ‘I’m Too High’. Impressive stuff.

Double Cup is a great collection of dance music that manages to be compelling in 14 different ways.

DJ Rashad indulges in his own tastes and viewpoints, ultimately creating an album’s worth of songs that are exciting on their own but exhausting and at times dull when listened to from start to finish.

Aside from anything, the album’s glut of southern coke-rap cuts are plain mundane; partly because trap is so horribly over-exposed right now, and partly because footwork sounds unordinary next to any genre you could name.