Jkyl & Hyde x SampliFire - Play With Fire

Two producers whose whole job is making a speaker cone regret its life choices, on one track, is bad news for your subwoofer and good news for the rest of us. “Play With Fire” is exactly the kind of maximal, mid-range-shredding dubstep that gets sneered at by people who think the genre peaked with a Loefah dubplate in 2007, and I do not care, because it works. The first drop is a growl that keeps mutating; every two bars the bass finds a new way to be uglier than it was, like it’s showing off. There’s a half-second of total silence right before the second drop that I keep flinching at even though I know it’s coming. What saves it from being wall-to-wall noise is that the sound design actually has ideas — the two of them are clearly trying to out-weird each other rather than just out-loud each other. It’s stupid in the way a monster-truck rally is stupid: self-aware, grinning, built to make a large room forget itself. Not something I’d put on doing paperwork. Everything about it is designed for a rig with real sub and a crowd that came to get hit.

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