Bliss

The Rhythmus Gene

Phantasm (UK)

If you like your fullon psytrance chunky and colourful, then my guess is you’ll like this. Bliss’ sounds are sharp, crisp and well-rounded and, for the most part, he has a knack for how to make a tune twist in the right way. However it often falls into Eskimo-isms, and isn’t actually as far evolved from bog-standard Israeli trance as it thinks it is.

The Love Hack opens up chunky: gradually getting bigger and bigger, with fluid hypnotic sounds swirling around in the ether and keeping you interested. The sound is like a more uplifting Gataka; tasty kick slides under a fluid and stretchy topend, and once it picks up its pace it runs headlong into an incredibly tasty run – meaty, lean, and with all your essential trance vitamins. No Gravity continues where we left off… the power here is what it’s all about. There’s nothing that really breaks the mould here, it’s all fairly standard-pattern material, but what it does it does very well. The airy, arms-in-the-air breakdown and same-vein finale are well-executed and have the potential to make the crowd have one of those great shared moments.

The title track has a grittier edge to it, and some very interesting sounds that layer together to create an almost bluegrass-y, acoustic groove. But there’s just too much stop-start… you instinctively know when the stops are going to come in, and by the time it finishes you’re sort of left wondering whether anything just happened. Upside Down starts out great, before bringing in this over-clean highend sound, that’s not exactly been over-used but you’ll recognise it from a fair bit of anthemic Israeli trance. After which, it more less picks up and up and up, with plenty of those key changes all culminating in that high-end again, before it ends with something of a whimper.

Dirty Boy is a decent and powerful tune, with good attitude and well-crafted sounds. Then some samples from a vaguely sexy bird come in (“dirty boy”, etc), then it peaks just like an Eskimo track, and then it’s more or less all over. Pause is an interesting track – it builds and then just comes crashing down: admirably different. However it takes no time to launch itself up again into full-scale i-can’t-believe-it’s-not-junya. Tribal Waves has a great, measured buildup that shows that Bliss can do subtle when needed. The build here is very well-done, and I can see it doing wonders on the dancefloor. Monitor Access made me smile with it’s cut up “I just know yo gonna dig this”… which I think was used by either S-Express or Bomb The Bass (or possibly both) back in the “day”. At the outset, it’s a funkier, sparser tune… and then the melodies come in. And they are relentless. There’s a high end Fatali-esque lead and violently shifting keys in the bassline, both of which make me tremendously uncomfortable: shame.

Miracle Whip has a piano as its main lead – sort of half-Infected, half-Clayderman. It switches to that funny-shuffle-quantize thing for a spell, then switches back, and it’s all about thunking things into your face. Interesting, but nothing special. Finally, Spaceless has a bassline that makes me want to shove wine bottles up my backside, and despite a series of interesting sounds escalating quite adequately, this isn’t something I can get past. Which is probably my loss. In short, nothing special. It’s good at what it does, and I’d be keen to catch a liveset to see it all in action – dance music is, after all, about moving a crowd, which this does well. However in-itself, The Rhythmus Gene is more or less fullon psytrance with a different garnish. Which as such is inherently disposable.

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