Enabl.ed - "Disabled"

Artist: Enabl.ed
Album: Disabled
Year: 2010
Label: Lovethechaos
Genre: IDM, Glitch
Website: http://www.myspace.com/iameb57







Basics:
Enabl.ed is the fairly new moniker of Iameb 57, or you may even know him as Artificial Dreamer. Anyway, Enabl.ed is apparently a new project to release with since Iameb 57 releases are now tied down to label Neuva Forma. Enabl.ed is nearly analogous, musically (beautiful melodies; intricate, glitchy percussion; brief track durations), to his IDM alter ego Iameb 57, which is fine by me as I am a pretty big fan of said project.

Good stuff:
+ Old school sound. Somewhat similarly to his work as Iameb 57, Disabled EP has a really nice old school IDM sound to it. Again, I love the melodies and complex percussion. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what that “sound” is; what I know for sure is that this gives me feelings comparable to when I would to listen to Jega and early Chris Clark records years ago. It’s also fairly light hearted and upbeat.
+ Complex. One of the things that drew me to Iameb was the percussive style. I love ultra fast, complex glitch/weird drums and Enabl.ed delivers in similar, and equally compelling, quantities.
+ production/mastering.  The production on this record is definitely the best out of everything I’ve heard from him. Really tight mixing coupled with solid mastering. Everything sits together perfectly in the mix and sounds very well defined.

Bad stuff:
- not spacious. I have only two negative critiques of this record. The first is that it doesn’t capture the sense of ‘space’ or ‘bigness’ like other similar records (for example Atmogat, DNN, etc). This isn’t terrible, but at times where many layers of beats stack up it can feel a bit claustrophobic (NOT to be confused with muddy).
- short / Structureless...? My other critique is that all the songs are really short: nothing over 4 minutes, save for the final track. This isn’t really a problem, although, personally, I am a fan of longer songs which expand and develop as they progress. These, to an extent, lack structure and just sort of play on for a bit with no distinct parts and then end. Though, due to their brevity, they sound good and won’t lose your attention, though I think the ideas could have been developed a bit more and the songs made to ‘cover more ground’, if you will.

Summary:
A solid buy for fans of somewhat whimsical IDM such as Wisp, Jega, Fractional, etc . Not quite as technical as those, but it won’t disappoint. This came out on limited edition vinyl which I heard has already sold out, so try to find this while you can!

Overall Rating: 8/10