Sasha ‎– Airdrawndagger

Forgot how good this album is - sasha’s best. Scene Delete has its moments but doesn’t have the staying power. Glad to get my hands on a copy. Always been of the opinion that he’s at best a great remixer and DJ but not the best recording artist. On this album - cloud cuckoo and bloodlock really work for me ( I think James Holden was involved with the latter ) but there aren’t any fillers here. Overall the album’s an atmospheric absorbing piece of work that still holds up.

The red vinyl re pressing is excellent btw

Unfortunately my copy had terrible hiss and static on the last side. Got a replacement copy and that was the same! Even cleaned up the noise is pretty audible and distracting. Obviously a pressing fault. Rest of the album plays fine, just side F!

my copy has with two records with sides C&D and misses sides D&F instead: anyone has the same problem?

[Note: this is a slightly edited version of a review I originally wrote in 2009, but which has been unavailable to read online for several years now]

There are few electronic music long players out there with more mixed reviews than Airdrawndagger. Historically, it will be remembered as a flop: it received a middling critical reception upon release, and although it reached #18 on the UK album chart in 2002, it underperformed considerably even compared to disappointing albums from other electronic stars such as Orbital, Faithless and the Chemical Brothers during that same period. And yet, ask around online or amongst clubbers and you’ll probably find a generally positive, even nostalgic opinion of the album.

The reason is simple. Alexander Coe had been promising an artist album since he first exploded in popularity in the early 1990s (for whatever reason, it was decided long ago by unanimous jury that The Qat Collection was not to count). Indeed, during his more debauched moments of superstardom, Sasha would claim he’d been locked in the studio working on his album to explain cancellations and no-shows. After several years of excuses, tantalising references in interviews and a steady stream of brilliant EPs, expectation began to grow exponentially for Sasha to deliver his mythical long player. By 2002, the critics and established fans had been waiting almost a decade, and as is so-often the case, the end product failed to match the enormous weight of expectation. “Rather late in the day, Sasha makes the best album of 1993” quipped Muzik Magazine in a 3/5 review that summarised the mild bemusement that greeted this strangely retro, semi-ambient record.

At the same time, a very different audience was happening across the record, an audience with no critical voice to contribute to the historical record and no expectations to weigh the album down. By 2002 trance was in the last throes of worldwide dancefloor dominance. An entire generation of clubbers who’d been inducted into the scene during the millennial epic trance zenith were making the transition from Gatecrasher to Global Underground and more serious, reputable dance music. Turned on to Sasha by the success of Xpander across the trance scene, they encountered Airdrawndagger en masse at exactly the right moment. Sasha toured the album worldwide that year and the youthful demographic he enthralled, particularly in the US, grew up to be the serious clubbers of the following generation. To many of them Airdrawndagger is a pivotal moment in their musical development, regarded with nothing short of reverence.

So where does Airdrawndagger really lie? Is it the underwhelming flop of the history books or the progressive classic of many people’s sentiments? The answer, obviously, is somewhere between those two poles.

What’s striking about Airdrawndagger is just how much like a Sasha set it sounds. Many jocks have tried their hand at artist albums in the past twenty years, but this is a DJ’s album in the purest sense. It’s constructed like a mix set from start to finish, each track seamlessly blending into the next with close control of rhythm and tempo. It builds from an ambient intro through breaks and into 4/4 beats to climax with the killer single, the tempo of each track sliding up from a sub-120 start to the same pulsing 130+ plateau so many Sasha sets reach. Needless to say, the structure and flow are immaculate, and this is an album that demands playing all the way through for the full effect.

While this is probably Airdrawndagger’s greatest strength, it’s almost certainly it’s biggest creative weakness. For not only did Sasha look to his DJ sets for inspiration, he looked very closely at the records he would use on such mixes, and then recreated them closely with the studio help of Charlie May, Junkie XL and James Holden. This is an endlessly referential album, packed with nods to countless classic Sasha anthems. The studio helpers weren’t drafted by accident: the influence of Spooky and Holden is writ large across the album, as are the sounds of Eat Static, Scott Hardkiss the FSOL, Orbital (Immortal is an astonishingly faithful style-bite of the Middle Of Nowhere sound) and many others.

Airdrawndagger is essentially Sasha remaking his favourite records of the previous ten years of electronic music and then slotting those remakes into a small-scale DJ mix. It’s an understandably “safe” way of making an artist album, particularly a long-awaited debut, but it doesn’t result in a particularly fresh or distinctive creative product. Sasha is so wrapped up in living up to his favourite music he never really creates anything of his own. Xpander, despite its use of the Little Bullet hook, was a cutting edge record, as were Arkham Asylum, Ohmna and, to a lesser extent, Be As One and Heart Of Imagination. While some of them might sound dated today, they encapsulated the very limit of progressive, well - *progress* - when they were released, which is why each one sounds so drastically different to its predecessor. By reversing the trend and making a record so carefully classic in approach, Sasha was aiming for timelessness but fell some way short. If instead he’d had continued to push the progressive paradigm into unexplored territory, he might have created a more resonant record than the risk-averse album he ended up with.

All of which is not to say it’s a complete failure. There are a handful of wonderful moments on Airdrawndagger. Fundamental is one of the best progressive breaks tracks ever made, Magnetic North is a fine piece of liquid ambient and the closer Wavy Gravy is an example of the intrepid dancefloor approach the album needed more of. Everything is perfectly produced with a distinctively crisp shininess and as you’d expect from Sasha it flows with captivating smoothness, the highlights augmented by the album’s bigger picture. It just isn’t the album it could have been. Sasha’s music had always had plenty of home listening value: the Xpander EP is probably a better headphone record than this one, and certainly a more timeless one.

For the clubbers of 2002 who’d never heard its like before it’s understandable that this album sounded unreal, and once that kind of impression has bedded into your musical youth there’s no dislodging it. Heard through less sentimental ears, Airdrawndagger is an album that deserves more credit than it original received, but it’s some way short of the classic some would have you believe.