Australian producer Jordan Alexander’s moniker ‘Mall Grab’ is a term people in skateboarding circles use to describe the way ‘posers’ hold their skateboards at the mall. Like accessories rather than serious equipment. It’s a piece of nomenclature that harkens back to Alexander’s origin point: the circa-2012 internet age. This time saw the collision of skate, stoner, and dance music culture birth what would become known as lo-fi house, and with it a bevy of amusing monikers attached to bedroom producers who didn’t take themselves too seriously. Accessories, not equipment. Since that initial SoundCloud boom, many of lo-fi house’s key players have moved beyond the bedroom and have, for all accounts, become quite serious. Names like Ross From Friends and DJ Seinfeld hold more weight now than they may have ever anticipated, and the music associated with these names has evolved in tandem. Mall Grab meanwhile, has always kept a sense of online wit about him. Naming tracks after memes, pushing the lo-fi house template into increasingly ironic territory with hammed up hip-hop samples and hi-NRG aesthetics are a few cases in point. But outside of the Mall Grab moniker, Alexander has been a touch more adventurous. 2020’s Ohana pulled from ambient, footwork, and even shoegaze to make up its track list of trippy IDM that stands in dextrous contrast to Mall Grab’s usual fuzzy four on the floors.
On his debut album as Mall Grab, Alexander looks to reconcile these two sides of his practice into a singular, cohesive project. The problem here is obvious. In tying Jordan Alexander to Mall Grab, the polarity between the two threatens to cancel each other out. Alexander attempts to avoid this by focussing his efforts on the common thread between both personas; his adopted home of London. Classic UK dance styles become a major influence. On I Can Remember It So Vividly, he weaves lo-fi, 8-bit arpeggios with skittish garage, while on Times Change he links jungle with grime with help from D Double E and Novelist. Sometimes, the approach works in his favour. The jungle rave of Metaphysical manages to maintain Mall Grab’s anything but subtle approach while sounding like a progression of sorts. Similarly, throwing the emo-core vocals of Turnstile’s Brendan Yates against cascading pads and a two-step beat on Understand feels like a logical and exciting evolution from Feel U. Breathing touches on Mall Grab’s recent techno inclinations by marrying these to his current UKG fixations.
Download and stream What I Breathe here
But between these more successful moments are ones that feel less genuine or fully realised. Times Change ultimately sounds a touch lost in itself, while Patience fails to take advantage of guest vocalist Nia Archives, whose own music has been pushing the boundaries of UK dance by tying it to soul and jazz. On Patience, she’s placed over a placid half-time beat full of hi-hats and haze that feels pulled from Alexander’s 2015 archive. The pull between Mall Grab past and present is most palpable here, but it’s a struggle that is fought across the album on tracks like Without The Sun or Lost In Harajuku. These tracks, which sound most like whatever Alexander was doing six years back, stand in contrast to his ravey experiments on Metaphysical or the similar Intercity Relations. Elsewhere, he attempts the DJ Seinfeld formula on Spirit Wave and Love Reigns, further muddying What I Breathe’s overall direction.
Despite its disjointedness, What I Breathe is not without its merits. Alexander’s work on the synthesiser is laudable, particularly on tracks like Intercity Relations or Distant Conversation which sans Alexander’s synths, would be significantly less interesting. There’s also a sense of Alexander growing away from sampling as irony toward sampling as craft, a shift that allows threads of his production skill to work in harmony rather than be dominated by a gag. What I Breathe is an overall solid offering, considering that this is in fact Mall Grab’s debut album. It’s easy to forget, with Alexander’s prolific status in underground circles for the past half decade. This album shows that although we may be attuned to experience things at the speed of the internet, creative growth is a process that cannot be rushed. Alexander is naturally held to significant standards based on his popularity, but he is still very much an artist in the process of becoming. What I Breathe is the first leap in what has been a series of steps toward whatever, or whoever, that may be.
Listen to Understand from What I Breathe below.
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