Floorplan – Phobia

Phobia is the best interpretation of Tiësto’s Flight 643 ever.

yeh massive tunes here, from 2 legends of the game

This is an absolute floor crusher, and the best track Rob Hood has released under this alias in ages. In my opinion, Phobia easily overshadows the Paradise album. The title track fiercly pounds on with cavernous percussion underpinned by typically stubborn Hood synth stabs, suggestive of a slamming moment of dance floor crafted brilliance. The intensity accumulates to insane heights, and by the three minute mark there's hardly room to breathe. The deadly break accentuates the incessant onslaught of piercing stabs, only to reintroduce the drums with more menace a minute later. Devastating in clubs, Phobia simply decimates any recent production of his. Funcrusherplus.

Ben Sims churns out a very solid funk fused techno work out. Basically, you get the usual juiced up Sims drum arrangement, that'd get a dozen depressed eulogists up and dancing, a swinging bass that jogs along nicely and goes with virtually anything uptempo and designated to obliterate big rooms. However, what makes this stand out is how he worked his way around the synths. He practically reinvents them, making them less restrained - after all, the original is by the master builder himself - and by echoing them in and out of the track during multiple breaks, creating an overwhelmingly elated monster of a track. A very optimistic, and deadly effective manifest of pure techno. The original had somewhat of a scattered beat, the Ben Sims remix is an all out head dive in peak time techno spheres.

Glory B, in a way, picks up somewhere where the Santicified EP left us... Not that it copies the formula, but the preachy vocals are a nod to the larger than life We Magnify His Name, with the trademark two note Hood stabs call to mind the very club friendly Baby Baby. Glory B is less visceral than the previous two, but you'll hardly notice that once the insane claps fly in. Personally, I could have used a voxless passage, with just the beat stuttering along and taking a beating from the battering claps, but I guess you cannot always have it all, can you? Even if it's from Robert Hood.

As one can easily deduce, I'm all over this EP. Since the relaunch of M-Plant, this is quite probably my favorite Floorplan release. I'd have to dig in the back catalog first, if I wanted to praise it higher, but even leaving things as they are right now, Phobia is a great contribution to his legacy. Two cuts of untamable techno ferocity, and a track which sees mr. Hood continue his occasional flirting with gospel, while keeping in tact all the production facets he's known for.