Fabric bills this CD as “Bass music” or “dubstep” and wax lyrical about the sweet 140 beats per minute and act like this is all something new and exciting. However, if this CD was released 5 to 10 years ago, it would be labelled simply as “breaks”. And this is because breaks is such as wide genre, almost as indefinable as House, and certainly a lot more mutable than say DnB or Trance.

But, for whatever reason, breaks isn’t “cool” anymore, so dicks like the A&R people and promoters at Fabric along with journos who have to stamp their opinion on everything, have to come up with some other new terms to sell this music to the kids. Not like any of them buy it – I knew people who torrented this CD as soon as they heard about it. And it wasn’t because they’re into this music, but because it’s Fabric, and Fabric’s mixes are held in high regard.

So, yes, Fabric can sell as a brand, so why do they need to go further and break everything up into little sub-genres? I get that selling records is harder than ever in this day and age, but this tired splintering of music into smaller and smaller segments is not doing the industry any favours. It’s segmenting the audience, and moreover it’s making the audience dumb. People define music as dubstep, then suddenly people only like dubstep? That’s ridiculous!

Additionally, the music becomes boring and trite. Dubstep had been around for what, three years now and already the majority of it is full of RnB samples and remixes of popular commercial tunes. I mean there’s at least two Riverside remixes and probably more I simply haven’t had the misfortune of hearing! Motherfucker indeed!

Luckily, this CD has some decent tracks on it. Some of it is kind of housey. Some of it is kind of techy. And some of it is kind of dubby. And none of those terms are real words and I am putting my foot down and refusing to use them! Just get this album, listen to it and enjoy the music on it without putting any labels on it.

The producers who worked on these tracks probably started out with a formula, and for whatever reason their tunes didn’t stick to that. Hats off to Fabric for collecting all of this on one CD and getting it out there, but they shouldn’t pretend like they’ve discovered this wonderful new sound. It is breaks, no, it’s not even that – it’s electronic music – and in all its glory, so let’s stop pissing about with all these other genres and terms and get back to simply listening to and enjoying good music.