Album Review: Warm Ups

It’s been over a decade since I thought “I might listen to some techno”. Probably longer since EDM was even called techno… And even then, the genre was never the main event. It was a soundtrack to an activity; driving, drinking, dancing (not simultaneously). Background music.

I guess for me, this is a genre that’s meant to be experienced, rather than heard.

Which poses a unique challenge in terms of reviewing Western Dip’s Warm Ups. I’m yet to find a way to review while driving, drinking, or dancing. Likewise, I can’t drive, drink, or dance while reviewing. So I’m stuck here in my muggy home office, wearing a cheap headset used for Zoom meetings.

Warm Ups deserves more than a cheap headset. Some music sounds better coming from a shoulder-mounted boom box. Other music sounds better from an 80’s Coke can radio. For Western Dip, it would be the house speakers of a crowded basement bar, with drunk zoomers spilling their… Well I don’t know what that drink is, but it’s red and alcoholic, and smells like regret. Or a boom box, maybe. Coke can radio, no.

Yet, even through these unbranded, plastic speakers strapped to my head, I can tell Warm Ups is alright. The two-piece manage to merge their pieces cohesively. It feels like each track is a singular idea flowing from a central hook, rather than two people fighting for control.

It’s a little rough around the edges in some places maybe, a rhythm snapping in after the last one, rather than flowing through organically. It’s not enough to notice unless you’re reviewing it, but then all of this is excusable. I get the feeling that these eight unnamed tracks are more experiments, practices, blueprints for the soundtrack to a forgotten night out, and not Western Dip’s magnum opus. That will come with time. It will be unrecorded, and no one will hear it again, but it will be experienced profoundly by a student from out of town on his first ecstasy trip, surrounded by smoke machine fog and sweaty first years, tears in his eyes, shivers down his spine, his girlfriend’s shoes in his hand.

Warm Ups isn’t revolutionary, but it’s solid enough. A taste of things to come. If EDM is your heartbeat, you’ll love it. If it’s your soundtrack to a night out, then this is a great taster for the inevitably cancelled 2022 Western Dip rave.

Five of five stars.