Night Slugs All-Stars - Vol. 3 - Night Slugs All-Stars (CD) |

With the third instalment in their Allstars compilation series, Night Slugs matures as a label and as a family, and reaches out to a wider audience with a melodic music of compassion. In 2010, 2013 and now this year, each iteration of the Allstars series has marked a major transformation in the increasingly influential collective's aesthetic and outlook. They have become a key force on the international electronic club music scene, both by touring and spreading their diverse but distinctive sounds. With this release, the first Allstars to feature only fresh material, Night Slugs embraces musicality with a human core. Based in London but with an international reach, the club collective headed by producers and DJs Alex Sushon (Bok Bok) and James Connolly (L-Vis 1990) redefined the city's club sounds in 2010, incubating a vigorously hybrid blend of house, UK Funky, grime and dubstep and introducing audiences to artists such as Jam City, Girl Unit, and Kingdom (who went on to found Night Slugs's sister label Fade to Mind in 2011). By the end of 2013, Night Slugs had drawn on London grime, hip hop and US Club in developing a unique, stark and machinic club language that is everywhere today, high in intensity yet thrillingly cold. But with dystopian stances proliferating ominously not just in underground electronic music but in the world around us too, the crew decided it was time to get back to clear, emotive musicality. This is what marks them out from their peers, who all too often either reduce the passion of the club to a closed-off, niche and often cynical subculture, or else sacrifice the intimacy and tenderness of the underground for the bombast of the EDM world. Night Slug's expansion is an affective as well as a sonic one, an open-hearted endeavour to reach into listener's moods and lift them up. On Allstars Volume 3 it works, and it's difficult to explain just how it does, but it has a lot to do with those unparalleled hooks.