- Like his buddies, collaborators and fellow Northern Irishmen Bicep, Gary McCartney's music is steeped in early '90s garage and house. But this is no pastiche; instead it's raw, elemental and fresh music-making.
Lead track "Horizon" rides in on Nightcrawler-ish synths, proto-rave stabs and a vocal cut-up with forensic detail. It's a fizzing bath bomb of a record, with a vestigial '90s "whoo!" sample—although McCartney ensures it has just as much in common with contemporaries like Bashmore, Chamboche and co as it does thumping Swing 52-syle house. "Dazed" is a more restrained affair, little more than a mid-paced metronomic click for its rhythm and rudimentary bass at first. Then a single-note synth rips open the track's guts and the merest hint of a vocal sample is used as percussive device. It sounds like Bicep's surlier, frog-dissecting younger brother.
But it's "See Through You" that gives you the best indication of where Ejeca is at. It's a brilliantly-pitched, emotional slab of box-fresh UK bass-influenced deep house. With a squeaky UKG-style vocal, iridescent yet melancholic keys and a bassline that bubbles and bounces like a bungee, it's an emphatic highlighter pen through an EP that's far from blatant revivalism.
Tracklist 01. Horizon
02. Dazed
03. See Through You