fumu: enter the anima

FUMU finally unveils that long-promised new album for YOUTH following last year’s 'Almost, Never, Nearly Where?’ collection of sawn-off oddballs, presenting a throbbing pouch of productions that run the gamut from Bunker-style red-liners to ruffkut dancehall, sore electronics and a couple of brilliantly fucked vocal cuts that are prob the finest screwed-pop drills to have emerged from this city in years. A longtime spar of Turinn (Modern Love) and Richard Harris (Sockethead) as part of the Return to Zero gang, FUMU has been teasing skills for the last half-decade or so on a couple of deadly CD’s and one destroyed bashment 45 inspired as much by manc dancefloor undercurrents as the Bladerunneresque landscape of his formative Teesside stomping grounds. 'Enter The Anima’ is his debut vinyl longplayer, and delivers on keenest expectations in wild style, looking back at formative and fractious asphalt-grained dance music archetypes while pacing toward a new in-between mode that fizzes with too much energy to stay in one place for more than a minute. The palette is prob gonna be familiar to anyone who caught any of those previous bullets, but where it deviates is where FUMU has us most gripped, starting at the end of the line with the mad ‘Kiss Down' - easily the most progressive and brilliant thing here, framing Zula’s incredible vox around angular, slowed down madness that feels like a dismantled antithesis to hyperpop, deployed at a 70bpm crawl for ultimate unease, ending abruptly before it’s properly even begun. 'Forge Tides Of Fire Inside’ also plays with the form, this time re-imagining a booty flex spun off-centre, sort of miami bass via the nastiest Bomb 20 DHR missile, before "I Was Sunk Up To My Neck” frames a heads-down skank with classic manc-synths like some hidden cut off that 0161 comp. And actually that’s not a bad frame of reference for the album generally, a sort of wildly shredded update on signature manc electronic/club styles, except endlessly more fractious and moody - and all the better for it.