Album Review: Georgia – Seeking Thrills


Seeking Thrills




Of all the different things you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, being the son or daughter of a successful someone is probably the one with the most mileage. The precedents are mixed, but for Georgia Barnes – daughter of Leftfield’s Neil – it was obvious that the shadow cast would take something special to escape from.

Dad after all had been one of the first producers to introduce the stylings of Jamaican music’s sound system culture to European techno in the nineties, long before dubstep, but Georgia buckled up into the ride slowly at first, beginning as a session drummer for the likes of Kwes and Kate Tempest before releasing her debut album in 2015. Self-titled, this first outing seemed to be an equal contest between rhythm and melody, but on Seeking Thrills any doubts surrounding her club credentials are left behind like rave flyers blowing along an empty street.

Not to sound like an embarrassing uncle, but there are times when the apple doesn’t sound like it’s fallen far from the tree; the rumbling low end of Mellow nearly drowns out a Balearic sex jam fuelled by vodka jellies and amoretto, while the M.I.A-esque singsong skank of Ray Guns bops mightily, proof intriguingly of an inheritance far from totally spent.

While these are not quite diversionary, the balance of Seeking Thrills pays tribute to the era when both Chicago and Detroit were the protean seedbeds of the dance music we might recognise today, identities its millions of disciples embraced to the hedonistic max: here is a purist’s world as it was before bass began to crush chests and acid belches warped time and consciousness.

It was also a time for the camaraderie of strangers, as opener Started Out reminds: “We are wicked young fools who behave now/Back in the arms of somebody who saved us”. Low beats and iridescent melodies trumpeting the audacity of the forever young under neon lights. For all that however we’re still lacking an anthem to join the dots of lust and happiness, so when one arrives it’s right on cue, a hands-to-the-stars portal in which shit can be lost; About Work The Dancefloor is our story here, one that speaks to having nothing but being rich all the same, the robotic programming a love opera with warmth and soul.

It would be impossible to come straight down from this euphoria, so wisely there’s no tapering, Never Let You Go chewing on sticks of bubble gum, a rush of uncomplicated beats and Moroder-isms gone over ground, while 24 Hours shouts about surrender but in its tightness gives no single groove away.

If Seeking Thrills is about anything, it’s the notion that there are always more doors open to the past than those you can jam shut in the present. On it with anonymous ghosts for company, Georgia has made memories she never knew she had, alone in a room of thousands.

8/10

Andy Peterson


Learn More