[Hessle Audio]

Peverelist’s two weighty twelves in 2010 seemed to hint at a slightly more energetic direction, where the power that used to lay dormant and stationary beneath the Punch Drunk label head’s stony beats began to surface in twitchy percussion. Tom Ford’s first release of 2011, weirdly enough, comes on Hessle Audio, and it’s appropriately a departure from his past work, taking the nervous tics of “Better Ways Of Living” or “The Hum” and jetting off with them into full-on rave hysteria.

“Dance Til The Police Come” is the sound of the Bristol producer fleshing out trembling junglisms into heart-racing river rapids. Peverelist’s typical array of shaking metallic percussion is suddenly beefed up with synths, a blurred mid-range that feels noticeably lusher than the prehistoric sticks and stones of previous work. You can still tell it’s him: the demented, stumbling chord progression, snares that seem too hesitant to do anything other than hint at a rhythm, and grumbling sub-bass, but the rushes of ghostly synth that fly by are definitely something new. The whole thing flies by in a frenzied blur that flipside “Fundamentals” somewhat disavows, staking its claim in more familiarly dubby territory but still working off an expanded synth palette that’s almost symphonic in Peverelist terms. Ford sketches out a vision of primitive garage that staggers through periods of mournful organ saturation and unnervingly empty dub chambers. It always struck me as odd how Peverelist was grouped with the techno/dubstep people when his music clearly owed more to traditional dub than most others, and with tracks like these it’s becoming apparent that his move is less one towards techno than a bloodletting of the jungle and UK hardcore music that runs through his veins.