A staple of Moscow’s dance music underground and somewhat of a secret weapon within the Rekids and Naif stables, Siberian-born producer Nina Kraviz arrives with her debut LP after a healthy string of singles, including last year’s minor groundswell with “Ghetto Kraviz,” which makes a welcome appearance here. Even without the knowledge of Kraviz’s scene-treading CV and high-heeled, cigarette-and-denim decor – which she isn’t exactly shy about printing on her record sleeves – the producer’s music breathes a hard-edged, feminine cool that’s at once sensual and knives-out biting. As a singer, she strives toward an exhaled-smoke, smeared-eye-liner, alone-at-4am type of weariness that weaves its way into her music’s bruised coloring rather than standing atop it. Her 14-track debut is an assured and comprehensive statement of leering, hollowed out deep house that’s as self-assured as it is consequently subversive.
The Russian producer builds her tracks around a stubborn, pulsating 4/4, wrapping subtle, isolated synth hooks and repressive vocal exhalations like tired, wispy fingers around the otherwise apathetic throb. But a precarious negative space filled to the brim with energetic and hostile introversions resounds as thickly as the chunky, chocolate-y kick drums. It’s easy to chalk a track’s elusive, near-sub-textural tone up to atmosphere, but Kraviz leaves her music relatively sparse and dry, opting for EQ and volume rather than layered obfuscation and delay. It mirror’s the romantic lyrical half-sentiments bubbling their way out of the silence. And it gives the record the intoxicating, intimate atmosphere of a nearly-deserted dance floor drowned in shadows shambling toward the night’s close.
Ambient opener, “Walking In The Night,” sets the tone nicely with some icy, plateaued synths and mournful feminine vocal squalls before moving onto “Aus,” which, along with “Ghetto Kraviz” might be the most outgoing track on the record. Though it still shows Kraviz’s penchant for an almost aggressive amount of restraint. Its clanging ride cymbal is its most pervasive texture and only every couple measures will some squelching jazz chords crop up between some talk-y male vocals. When an oozing, fluttering organ melody shows up the color of navy blue Kool-Aid it’s hard not to be convinced by its unabashed, hard-lean coolness. “False Attraction” sits on the opposite end of Nina Kraviz‘s tonal spectrum; it leads with marching, mechanical bounce before a quivering, insectoid synth starts to hum nearly out of sight like an ominous synthetic theremin and more pulpy keys breathe in and out. The track barely exists at all, Kraviz’s frustrated stop-start whispers and double-tracked declarations circling around a thick, chewy bass hook and little else.
Despite its hair-splittingly specific production qualifications Nina Kraviz remains tied a certain retrofied traditionalism, borrowing pallet and all from textbook jazz-infected deep house and British electro pop of two decades earlier, often playing like an inside-out Theo Parish. Though it does find some unlikely destinations within its determined aesthetic. “Working” might sound at home on a Modern Love record and “Turn On The Radio” bangs along like a maligned take on garage disco. With this long-player Kraviz stakes her place as one of the most well-defined artists working in deep house and one of the most vital as well.
